ways.

As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me another
smooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdle
that has slipped down a little on one side.

CHAPTER 2

_Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural._

--Hamlet

When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no flesh
against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over and
there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from
me, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'd
screwed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump.

She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to her
knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned.

She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamily
but with a faint, easy smile.

I smiled back at her.

It was lovely.

Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it.

There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worth
noticing really.

But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating,
like _one_ mosquito.

When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back,
revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her forehead
scar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swift
though not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and to
the left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightened
out.

I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it was
something we had in common, something that brought us closer. And she
shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realize
I loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her,
that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?

Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, her
contemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare,
critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to know
about the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece of
information worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to cover
up, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up so
that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There were
lots of things wrong with her manners.

Oh, I know that