I recognized what Bronwen was immediately. She was my satanic miracle. I knew it. Her image seemed to leave a print on my sight when I looked away from her. She was reading Nelson’s book with ferocious concentration. I could tell she was believing it.

Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.