"Your night with that bitch?," Dottie inquires between mouthfuls of toast.

"Yes, another night," Constance sighs. She looks out the window to where the last rays of sun have steeped the summit of a stand of maple trees in crimson glory. So brief a thaw, these nights, and so swiftly is their passion frozen solid again against its hunger to flow, so swiftly stopped the red, pulsing wayfares newly-made to the sea she and Babe never sail. She pictures winter covering with snow the red-iced passages they've forged against the seasons and the tides; she imagines random air reconnaissance revealing a vast pink delta of shallow waters vulnerable to cold, to heat, arrested in shivering, depressive winter torpor or bleached pinkly dry by those interminable summers when, parting, they've gone home, and are waitresses.

"One problem, of course," she acknowledges ruefully to the illuminated trees, "is that it's the fin-de-siecle."

Dottie snorts. "Fin bitch."

There is a wooden building standing abandoned on the northeastern edge of Girls School's grounds, an old meeting house with gray, peeling clapboards for its shroud, that even Constance rarely approaches. Its ancient shutters hang askew: at night they creak and slap the walls with startling reports while the wind hoots owl-like through the shattered windowpanes. Although the doors are boarded shut there is a secret entrance, and to spend a moonless night alone in the meeting house is the formal rite of passage for all girls who would seek a room on the Hall of Reprobates. In the crepuscular gloom of the abandoned meeting house, mildew stains odoriferous and hieroglyphic cover every surface: the once white walls, the tumbled benches, the dislodged balconies, the empty sconces; while in the rafters, above the second tier of windows, hoarse ravens have built their nests and bats flit blindly. Here it was that headmaster Doctor Horace Greenwich, his father Jonah, the retired headmaster, and the entire faculty and administration of The Greenwich School for Boys ate their final meal.