It was a funeral, a terrible thing. Georges drove Isabella there. When he saw her he made a private decision to wait for her return, and did. He parked at the foot of the path that wound upward into the cemetary, in a patch of blue shadow cast by aged cedars, and sat in the car for two hours with the bonnet lowered.
She wore black, of course, but not a dress. Society had always endowed a cross-dressing woman with unique charm, yet none of its derogations for men who did the same had ever applied to Isabella. In men's clothes she was taken out of herself in a way that a girl in a suit and tie could never be, caught in between, beached. George fancied vengefully that her second cousins and aunts by marriage would be embarrassed, and implore her to return to her spotted veils and mourning satins.
It angered him that anyone should contrive such a twisting of nature as a gesture of respect, least of all Isabella herself.