She was perhaps eighteen years old.
Renee, the fourth member of the circle, was always well-dressed and
somehow _chic_. Her silhouette had character, from the waved coiffure to
the enormously high heels. Had Renee been able to restrain a perfectly
toothless smile she might possibly have passed for a _jeune gonzesse_.
She was not. The smile was ample and black. You saw through it into the
back of her neck. You felt as if her life was in danger when she smiled,
as it probably was. Her skin was not particularly tired. But Renee was
old, older than Lena by several years; perhaps twenty-five. Also about
Renee there was a certain dangerous fragility, the fragility of unhealth.
And yet Renee was hard, immeasurably hard. And accurate. Her exact
movements were the movements of a mechanism. Including her voice, which
had a purely mechanical timbre. She could do two things with this voice
and two only--screech and boom. At times she tried to chuckle and almost
fell apart. Renee was in fact dead. In looking at her for the first time,
I realised that there may be something stylish about death.
This first time was interesting in the extreme. It was Lily's birthday.
We looked out of the windows which composed one side of the otherwise
windowless Enormous Room; looked down, and saw--just outside the wall of
the building--Celina, Lena, Lily and a new girl who was Renee.
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