from which it was blowing, and was astonished to see a group of wild velvet men and women and a few children walking down the centre of the street. I could see them quite clearly because the wind had blown a clear passage for them through the haze of dust. Then I heard the sound of music. It was more hesitant than at any other time I had heard it, with unusual dissonances, and the velvet people moved very slowly, almost carefully, though no less gracefully than usual. Listening to the music they were making, I felt instinctively that the discordances I heard were not mistakes but part of the music, and that it was being delicately and intricately shaped around the obstructions that were the clay people’s buildings. It reminded me of trying to play a piece on a piano that had several broken keys, so that you must quickly find alternate keys. It was as if these wild velvet people were striving to create a music that would encompass the obstructions and barriers thrown up by the clay people.
I had never seen nomadic velvet people in the town before, and I wondered if this walk was an attempt to heal the people who had once made music here, by creating new lines of song that might be walked. Two young velvet women appeared in a street ahead of the walkers, clad in the slovenly cast-off shifts of the clay folk. One walked a little ahead of the other, inclining her head as if to listen to something she could barely hear, and the second came behind her, plucking at her dress fretfully. Both stopped and gaped at the sight of the wild velvet people, and after a moment the first girl kicked off her shoes impatiently. Her face was trans-figured by wonder but the other girl merely stared at her in stupid amazement.
The song walkers arrived at the intersection where I sat, and as I looked at them, the oldest of the velvet men looked up and met my gaze, without breaking his slow stride or interrupting the song. He showed no surprise to find me sitting there watching, which gave me the queer feeling that he had known all along that I was there and could see him and the others. The look he gave me was long and searching, as if my face were a book he was reading, then his eyes widened and he smiled, a startling crescent moon of white. He took several swift steps towards me and then away, which gave a peculiar thrilling trill to the song he was walking, and made the other walkers look at him. I held my breath, for it seemed to me that I had just been woven into their music.
The velvet man smiled at me, and pointed to my feet. I looked down at them, clad in their neat, white leather, buttoned boots, and noted the stain of red on them though I had not taken a single step. I thought of the velvet girl who had taken off her shoes, and wondered what I would hear if I took off my boots and stockings and stood barefoot in the dust. But when I looked up, the man and the other velvet people had vanished, and even as I watched, the wind erased their path and whirled away, leaving only the hot, sticky red stillness.
Mama came out then, and I forgot what I had seen in the business of getting the crates of black, gelid eggs into the back of the carriage.
Preparations for the ball had swallowed weeks of time, but suddenly the day dawned and I was watching Mama’s maid lace her into her boned petticoat and make up her face, then a hairdresser spend an hour brushing and pinning and winding her mass of pale yellow hair into a delicate tower of tiny curls and ringlets around sprigs of violets and fastening it with amethyst combs. Last, the dress was held out and Mama slipped her arms into its short lace sleeves. It was made of watered silk and silk chiffon in twenty shades of violet, layered like the petals of a vast flower, and as the hundreds of tiny buttons were fastened all down the back of the gown, another maid powdered Mama’s bare white shoulders and long swan’s neck, and slipped on her jewel-encrusted slippers. Mama permitted me to spray a mist of exotic scent on each slim wrist and on the