I’ve slept all night stretched out on this board floor, my head against a box, and now my muscles and joints are so wooden that I can barely move them at all. My stomach convulses, and thirst scorches my mouth. I’m covered, I perceive, with a tweed coat, and not a very handsome one at that, a shoddy coat, made of thin stuff, short-term economy. Whose coat? Sickeningly, I recall, and look around me. He’s gone. My memory, unhappily clear as spring water now, bubbles up coldly. It could not have been I, Hagar Shipley, always fastidious if nothing else, who drank with a perfect stranger and sank into sleep huddled beside him. I won’t believe it. But it was so. And to be frank, now that I give it a second thought, it doesn’t seem so dreadful. Things never look the same from the outside as they do from the inside. Something else occurred last night. Some other words were spoken, words which I’ve forgotten and cannot for the life of me recall. But why do I feel bereaved, as though I’d lost someone only recently?
