The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

drunker and more free-speaking her quarry became the better her inquisition would proceed.
    “You have not told me your name,” she said sweetly.
    “Nor will I,” snapped the woman. “I am wearing a mask. Are you a fool? Are all of you people fools?”
    “I do beg your pardon,” said Miss Temple demurely, repressing the urge to throw her glass at the lady’s face. “It sounds as if you have had a rough time of things today—is there another who has caused you annoyance? I do hope there is something I can do to help?”
    The woman sighed tremblingly, and Miss Temple was again surprised—even dismayed a little—at the ease with which even a false kindness can pierce the armor of despair.
    “I beg your pardon,” the woman said, her voice just over a whisper—and it seemed then that her companion was a person who very rarely in her life had need to say those words, and that she only voiced them now out of utter desperation.
    “No no, please,” insisted Miss Temple, “you must tell me what has happened to make your day so trying, and then together we shall find an answer.”
    The woman tossed off the rest of her port, choked for a moment, swallowed with difficulty, then poured again. This was getting alarming—it was not even time for supper—but Miss Temple merely wetted her own lips on her glass and said, “It
is
very delicious, isn’t it?”
    The woman did not seem to hear, but began to speak in a lowsort of mutter, which when combined with her brittle, sharp voice gave the effect of some circus marvel, one of those disquieting carnival automaton dolls that “spoke” through a strange breathy mix of bladders of air and metal plates from a music box. The sound was not exactly the same, but the spectacle was similar in the way the blonde woman’s voice was disturbingly at odds with her body. Miss Temple knew this was partially because of the mask—she had done a great deal of thinking about masks—and was oddly stirred by the movement of the woman’s coral-pink lips as they opened and shut within a proscenium of vivid feathers … the unsettling spectacle of her pale face, the puffed fleshy lips—though they were thin, they were still quite evidently tender—the glimpse of white teeth and the deeper pink of her gums and tongue. Miss Temple had a sudden impulse to shove two fingers into the woman’s mouth, just to feel how warm it was. But she caught her wandering mind and shook away that shocking thought, for the lady
was
finally speaking.
    “I am actually most agreeable, even tractable, that is the thing of it—and when one is of such a temperament, one is
known
and thus gets no credit for being so, people take it as assumed and then want more—they always want more, and such is my nature, for I have always strived within the boundaries of polite society to provide what I can to anyone I can, for I have tried not to be proud, for I could be proud, I could be the proudest girl in the land—I have every right to be whatever I want, and it is vexing, for there are times when I feel that I ought to be, that I ought to be another Queen, more than the Queen, for the Queen is old and horrid-looking—and the worst part is that if I just chose to be that way, if I just did start ordering and screaming and demanding, I would get it, I would get exactly that—but now I wonder if that is really true, I wonder if it’s all gone on so long that no one would listen, that they would laugh in my face, or at least behind my back, the way they all laugh behind my back—even though I am who Iam—and they would simply do what they are doing already, save more openly and without pretense, with disdain which I do not think I could bear, and my father is the worst of them, he has always been the worst and now he does not see me at all, he does not even attempt to care—he has never cared—and I am expected without question to accept a future chosen for me. No one knows the life I lead. None of you care—and this man, this vulgar
man—
I am expected—a foreigner—it is appalling—and my only solace is that I have always known that he—whoever he turned out to be—would prove the utter ruin of my heart.”
    The woman drank off her fourth glass of port—and who knew how many she’d consumed before Miss Temple’s arrival?—grimaced, and reached at once for the decanter. Miss Temple thought of her own father—craggy, full of rage, impossibly distant, only arbitrarily kind. Her only way of