The black tide of shoppers pours forth, divides, and there, just ahead: Assia, like a tiger lily walking the December streets, gaudy, exotic, exuding her sexual scent. It drifts down the sidewalk toward Sylvia, curling like smoke around the heads of the other oblivious pedestrians. Even from the back, Sylvia would know her anywhere—that mannequin carriage, that head sleek as a taxidermist’s bird. She is hurrying somewhere, she is late, working her way steadily through the crowd, adorned with kidskin and jewelry, polished black boots, her small, tailored handbag ornamenting the elbow of a coral pink coat; hair so unnaturally dark it’s almost purple. The black crowd is suddenly stagnant against Assia’s boldness, the machinery of her silks sheering forward. This isn’t the glass house of Chalcot Square; it’s not even the congregatory terraces of Regent’s Park Road. It’s the center of teeming London, and still, for Sylvia, Assia’s draw is magnetic. Her pull is irresistible, like the moon’s: Sylvia follows, helplessly bound to an unknown fate that this other woman, victorious, commands. Sylvia follows, lugging her unwieldy packages: hooked, like knitting, like a side of meat. Up the block, through a sea of unsuspecting faces, winding like a funeral procession of two toward the door of a bookshop, where Assia grips the tarnished doorknob in her gloved hand and enters, briskly turning only to shut the door tightly behind her, rattling the glass pane in its glazing, thunking the holly wreath and bells hung from a wire slung through the transom. Sylvia stops and stares.