All through the noisy luncheon Glory Bea would lay her hand over her wine glass when the waiter came patrolling her side of the long table. On his last trip around behind her, she almost relented and left her hand in her lap and let him pour. But she didn't. She held her head high and drank ice water. Even more than author did she prize her name in this town as impeccable lady. And ladies did not sit around in public restaurants at two o'clock in the afternoon drinking wine.

She had sat there through the annual autumn Junior Fortnightly Club guest luncheon, not reading one of her stories for the program for the first time in ten years, listening to that overweight Ella Follett, who could not wait to fill in with three vocal selections from The Sound of Music, a capella. Standing up there, lifting her hand, walling her eyes back like a dying cow. Those voice lessons her mother put her through certainly had made a fool of her.

Glory Bea simply had not been able to write a new story. Everyone in Ste. Marie was highly impressed by her prose. They told her so and praised everything she ever read, extravagantly, even though her oeuvre had ended up unpublished and in dress boxes under her bed. She was the only fiction writer in Ste. Marie, Louisiana, near the reedy shores of Lake Pontchartrain.