Summary

Ester lies awake in bed for about an hour next to Bernard. Once Bernard awakens, he steps out to look outside the window, then enters the bathroom. Ester gets up and goes to the dressing table and looks at her charm bracelet with six silver charms: "a lucky horseshoe, a sling-back shoe, an 'E', a '21', a snowflake, a love-heart" (100). She wore the bracelet on her wedding day and remembers Ida lifting her wrist to look disparagingly at the bracelets (100). It had been Ida's first Christmas gift to Ester and the charms were gifted to her by Conrad, her ex fiance. Ida tells Ester that she is not the one Bernard loves, that he had only loved a girl that Conrad took from him and then rejected, which spurred this engagement as a form of revenge (101). When she said this, a fleck of...