...she could not think of what had happened to her that day, or of what might happen that night. Instead, she watched the lamplighters move along the avenues even as their celestial counterparts set the stars alight in the sky. The rain had washed the city clean, and the air was a confection of clematis and violets and peony. Music and light spilled out of so many grand houses that the two seemed at once ubiquitous and united, as if to play a note was to send forth a ray of illumination, and a quartet was enough to set the grandest halls aglitter.
