By the crossing at Tallensbury there is an antique shop that looks just like any other shop in any other place, except that its falling plaster and dusty windows and faded paint are yours; it is your life it conceals and displays; it is your life the world walks past each morning without either interest or recognition; it is your body that, some day, they will board up and paint over and hand on to someone else. For the moment, though, nothing is certain; the contract remains to be drawn up; the man or woman who will sign it has yet to arrive; there is no slow and floral chariot, no order of seating, no purchase for regret. All things, such is your vanity, might be reversed, if you could find it within you to perform a small number of trivial things which were never intended to be difficult, but which, such is the age that has reached you, now seem impossible - though when they ask what exactly it is that must change, you start to say, as if describing a picture, that if you could only reach the amber light of the stables by nightfall, if you could only outstrip the grey light of dawn, if you could only present the case at the earliest opportunity within the appointed court – a distant court of which you know only this: that it is surrounded by leafy statues and long, brown pools of water - then all that would remain would be for the small bell above the door to exchange one world for the other, even if the street is empty now, even if no train halts near the junction today, even if it is too wet to go out just yet, or too dark to see, or too sunny to remain.