Hackworth drew a silk dressing gown from the wardrobe and poured it over 
his shoulders. Binding the sash around his waist, the cold tassels splashing 
over his fingers in the dark, he glanced through the doorway to Gwendolyn's 
closet and out the other side into her boudoir. Against that room's far windows 
was the desk she used for social correspondence, really just a table with a top 
of genuine marble, strewn with bits of stationery, her own and others', dimly 
identifiable even at this distance as business cards, visiting cards, note 
cards, invitations from various people still going through triage. Most of the 
boudoir floor was covered with a tatty
carpet, worn through in places all the way down to its underlying matrix of 
jute, but hand-woven and sculpted by genuine Chinese slave labor during the Mao 
Dynasty. Its only real function was to protect the floor from Gwendolyn's 
exercise equipment, which gleamed in the dim light scattering off the clouds 
from Shanghai: a step unit done up in Beaux-Arts ironmongery, a rowing machine 
cleverly fashioned of writhing sea-serpents and hard-bodied nereids, a rack of 
free weights supported by four callipygious caryatids—not chunky Greeks 
but modern women, one of each major racial group, each tricep, gluteus, 
latissimus, sartorius, and rectus abdominus casting its own highlight. 
Classical architecture indeed. The caryatids were supposed to be role 
models, and despite subtle racial differences, each body fit the 
current ideal: twenty-two-inch waist, no more than 17% body fat. That kind of 
body couldn't be faked with undergarments, never mind what the ads in the 
women's magazines claimed; the long tight bodices of the current mode, and 
modern fabrics thinner than soap bubbles, made everything obvious. Most women 
who didn't have superhuman willpower couldn't manage it without the help of a 
lady's maid who would run them through two or even three vigorous workouts a 
day. So after Fiona had stopped breast-feeding and the time had loomed when 
Gwen would have to knacker her maternity clothes, they had hired Tiffany 
Sue—just another one of the child-related expenses Hackworth had never 
imagined until the bills had started to come in. Gwen accused him, 
half-seriously, of having eyes for Tiffany Sue. The
accusation was almost a standard formality of modern marriage, as lady's maids 
were all young, pretty, and flawlessly buffed. But Tiffany Sue was a typical 
thete, loud and classless and heavily made up, and Hackworth couldn't abide 
her. If he had eyes for anyone, it was those caryatids holding up the weight 
rack; at least they had impeccable taste going for them.