Why did she attend such things, these interminable country weekends? She hated them, loathed them with a disdain and a scorn that passeth all understanding. But her husband insisted, and she, like a good and dutiful wife, put on her best face and agreed... ... all the while writhing in fury inside. The dinner was reasonable passing fare, the company not barely so — and she dreaded spending the entire weekend with these... poseurs, these charlatans. Even her own husband seemed transformed, into some monstrous parody of himself, cobbled together from pieces of character imposed upon him by these... people who claimed to be his friends. He was no longer a human being, let alone a poet. He was now some appalling assembly of hands and feet and face, stitched onto a body she barely recognized. He was no longer the Percy she knew and loved, nor would he ever be again. "Oh, let us all write something!" someone laughingly suggested, as though the act of creation would absolve them from what they had done to her and, by extension, her spouse. "Something deliciously frightening!" someone else added, as though that sort of prerequisite could pass without statement. The entire weekend promised to be harrowing; all she had do was merely transcribe the horrors on parade, and it would be enough to reduce the sternest member of Her Majesty's fleet to a quivering mass of fear. Of course no one expected her to write anything of any great merit. She was, after all, merely a woman, a wife, a shadow, an afterthought. But the rage within her, stitched and glued from the rotting dead corpses of a life she had long been forever denied, swelled up and, as though struck by lightning, exploded across the page. Her pen could not move fast enough. And when, after dinner, her time was called to read, she opened her portfolio in total surrender to the thing she had created... "It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."