all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day."
"I think I see," Cloud said. "But I think it only seems so."
"It isn't just that I've outgrown it." She was stacking up her captured red men in even piles. "Don't tell me that."
"It'll always be easier for children. You're an old lady now—children of your own."
"And Violet? What about Violet?"
"Oh, yes. Well. Violet."
"What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?"
"Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all."
That made sense, Daily Alice thought, and yet it couldn't explain the sense of loss she felt, a sense that things clear to her were being left behind, connections broken around her, by her, daily. When she was young, she had always the sense that she was being teased: teased to go on, ahead, follow somewhere. That was what she had lost. She felt certain that never again would she spy, with that special flush of sensibility, a clue to their presence, a message meant only for her; wouldn't feel again, when she slept in the sun, the brush of garments against her cheek, the garments of those who observed her, who, when she woke, had fled, and left only the leaves astir around her.
Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary.
"Your move," Cloud said.
"Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.
"Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't—take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment—never see a trade is possible." She thought of Auberon.
Through the windows of the music room, Daily Alice saw Smoky trudging home, his image refracted jerkily as it passed from one old rippled pane into the next. Yes: if what Cloud said were true, then she had taken Smoky in trade—and what she had traded for him was the living sense that it was they, they themselves, who had led her to him, they who had chosen him for her, they who had plotted the quick glances that had made him hers, the long engagement, the fruitful and snug marriage. So that though she possessed what she had been promised, she had lost in return the sense that it had been promised. Which made what she possessed—Smoky, and ordinary happiness—seem fragile, losable, hers only by chance.
Afraid: she felt afraid: yet how could it be, if the bargain had been truly struck, and she had done her part, and it had cost her so much, and they had gone to such trouble to prepare it all, that she could lose him? Could they be that deceitful? Did she understand so little? And yet she was afraid.
She heard the front door close, solemnly, and a moment later she saw Doc in a red plaid jacket come out toward Smoky, carrying two shotguns and other equipment. Smoky looked surprised, then shot up his eyes and smacked his forehead as though remembering something he'd forgotten. Then, resigned, he took one of the guns from Doc, who was pointing out possible ways they might take; the wind blew orange sparks from his pipe-bowl. Smoky turned away with him outward toward the Park, Doc still pointing and talking. Once, Smoky looked back, toward the upstairs windows of the house.
"Your move," Cloud said again.
Alice looked down at the board, which had grown disjunct and patternless. Sophie came through the music-room then, in a flannel gown and a cardigan of Alice's, and for a moment the two women stopped their game. It wasn't that Sophie distracted them; she seemed oblivious of them; she noticed them, but took no notice. It was that as she passed they both seemed to feel the world intensely around them for a moment: the wind, wild, and the earth, brown, outside; the hour, late afternoon; the day and the house's progress through it. Whether it was this sudden generality of