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bags and moved away. “I love you very much,” she told Sylvia.
    â€œHow could I have let myself forget that most marriages end in divorce?” Sylvia asked. “You don’t learn that in Austen. She always has a wedding or two at the end.”
    Allegra, Prudie, and Bernadette appeared as she spoke, carrying their coffee cups, napkins, plates. There was something, perhaps created by Sylvia’s words, of the bridal procession about it. The way the golden light reflected in the windows. The silence of the fog outside. The women coming, one after another, into the kitchen, with their dirty dishes held before them, until we were all gathered together.
    â€œLe monde est le livre des femmes,” Prudie offered.
    Whatever that meant. We could still see her lips, so she might have been perfectly serious, unless it was more of her ironic wit. Either way, we could think of no polite response.
    â€œMy dearest, most beloved Sylvia,” Jocelyn said. A tiny, ladylike drop of drool plinked from Sahara’s mouth to the stone floor. Our forks and spoons slid under the foam of soap in the sink. Allegra put her arms around her mother and her head on her mother’s shoulder. “We haven’t come to the end yet.”
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    Jocelyn explains the dog show:
    The judge generally begins by asking all handlers to gait their dogs around the edge of the ring and then stack them in a line along one side. As the dogs move, the judge stands in the center, assessing grace, balance, soundness.
    When the dogs are stacked—a pose designed to display the dog to best advantage—the judge conducts a hands-on examination of the bite, depth of chest, spring of ribs, shoulder angulation, coat, and body condition. On males, the judge manually confirms two testicles.
    After this, the handlers gait their dogs again, each in turn now, first moving away so the judge can evaluate frombehind, then coming back so the judge can see from the front. The judge watches for movement faults: Does the dog move true, or do his feet cross over? Is his stride free or tight, easy or restricted? In the final stages, the judge may ask competing handlers to gait two at a time so a direct comparison can be made, before selecting a winner.
    The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone’s mind.

CHAPTER TWO
    in which we read Sense and Sensibility with Allegra
    A partial list of things not found in the books of Jane Austen:
locked-room murders
punishing kisses
girls dressed up as boys (and rarely the reverse)
spies
serial killers
cloaks of invisibility
Jungian archetypes, most regrettably, doppelgängers
cats
    But let’s not focus on the negative.
    â€œI don’t think there’s anything better in all of Austen thanthose pages where Fanny Dashwood persuades her husband, step by step by step, not to give his stepmother and sisters any money,” Bernadette said. She repeated the same point in a variety of unilluminating ways while Allegra listened to the soft percussion of rain on the roof, the windows, and the deck. Bernadette was dressed today in something resembling desert robes, only periwinkle blue. Her hair had been cut, which left it less scope for improvisation, and she looked very nice, which was all the more remarkable for being a bit of magic done without mirrors.
    It was cold out, and wet, the way it gets in April just when you’ve convinced yourself that spring is here. Winter’s last laugh. The book club was circled about the woodstove in Sylvia’s huge living room, with the stove door open and the flames wrapped tight about the logs. Overhead, a hundred bird’s-eyes in the high bird’s-eye-maple ceiling looked down on the little gathering.
    Allegra’s elbow often ached when it rained, and she rubbed it without noticing she was doing so until she saw her mother look at her, which made her stop and think of something