It is Mim. It isn’t. It has been years since Rabbit has seen her. ‘Hi,’ Mim says, and kisses her father dryly, on the cheek. They were never even when the children were little much of a family for kissing. She would kiss her brother the same way, dismissingly, but he holds her, wanting to feel the hundreds of men who have held her before, this his sister whose diapers he changed, who used to hold his thumb when they’d go for Sunday walks along the quarry, who once burst out oh I love you sledding with him, the runners whistling on the dark packed slick, the street waxy with snow still falling. Puzzled by his embrace, Mim kisses him again, another peck on the same cheek, and then firmly shrugs his arms away. A competence in that. She felt lean, not an ounce extra but all woman, swimming must do it, in hotel pools, late hours carve the fat away and swimming smooths what’s left. She appears to wear no make-up, no lipstick, except for her eyes, which are inhuman, Egyptian, drenched in peacock purple and blue, not merely outlined but re-created, and weighted with lashes he expects to stick fast when she blinks. These marvellously masked eyes fore upon her pale mouth all expressiveness; each fractional smile, sardonic crimping, attentive pout, and abrupt broad laugh follows its predecessor so swiftly Harry imagines a coded tape being fed into her head and producing, rapid as electronic images, this alphabet of expressions. Her nose, her one flaw, that kept her off the screen, that perhaps kept her from fame, is still long, with that mortifying faceted lump at the end, exactly like Mom’s nose, but now that Mim is thirty and never going to be a model beauty seems less a flaw, indeed saves her face and gives it, between the peacock eyes and the actressy-fussy mouth, a lenient homeliness. And this, Rabbit guesses, would extend her appeal for men, though now she would get barroom criers, with broken careers and marriages, who want plain warmth, rather than comers who need an icy showpiece on their arm.