To Achieve PerfectionWhen the summer gets ripe with the fruit it is helping the autumn to gather, the people walk in the streets with the pride to have got from the countryside their due in produce, to have got from the seaside their pay for servicing holiday-makers, with the confidence of youth who has but a short while to show off round suntanned beauty, and with the dignity of the businessmen contracting the sale of things to whose production they have had no labour contribution

To Achieve Perfection

Then one could say that The Summer is Adorned

Some people might attempt to specify what the summer is adorned with, and might get as far as the idea of beauty, or pride, or relaxation, or the habit to look for comfort

However adorned, the summer has its lasting critic, The Hater

To Achieve Perfection

A person, a former symbol of the combination of beauty, pride, relaxation, of the developed habit to look for comfort

What The Hater had achieved was now a burden too heavy to carry on her shoulders

She had achieved all through the efforts of other people who created it, and through still other people who had distributed the products among their ranks, which included her

Her social background now lost forever, The Hater had a new reason to hate

To Achieve Perfection

The Hater hated the Angry Bag, and both hated the Missing ModelThe Angry bag was brown because it was depressed, had gone through all the emotions a bag experiences after the short periods when it is full or not so empty, was worn with the emotions of the other empty bags, was ready to relax and prepared to take its social status for granted, and was getting angrier all the time because no one noticed that it was angry, all the people noticed was that the bag was empty

To Achieve Perfection Sometimes called the Angry

Bag, sometimes the Skeptic, it was the observer of reality

It now had neither a new, nor its old position

Neither the old certainty, nor a new hope

It was not taken for granted by the present because it belonged to the past, nor by the future because it had no present

It was neither taken from, to be given in return, nor could take what it wanted, nor give what it did not need, nor be given in return for what it was prepared to give

All it had was its position of the Skeptic sometimes called the Angry Bag

To Achieve Perfection

It was like The Double House on the Same Site, angry but doing nothing to not be

The Angry Bag had its practised in front of a mirror vanity, it wanted to achieve perfection to become a model

To Achieve Perfection

Its vanity was supported by the news that The Missing Model had turned up in a luxury sea resort

The news made a story very convenient, to both hear and to repeat: once one cast all one’s indignation upon the world that allowed for models to go missing, once one hated the models because they spent their time in luxury, once one hoped that if one went missing someone would go looking for one, meanwhile one might be in a nice place, once one hated the world for not providing one with a fine place without one’s obligation to go missing

To Achieve Perfection

The fact that a model is missing is rarely connected with negligence of duty, or with disloyalty to an agent, or with adverse model engagements

The environment which is the setting for the image that models have, is discussed in the colours of the most lustrous rainbows

When models disappear, they are thought to have got integrated in one or another of the splendid hues of the places of luxury and ease

To Achieve Perfection

Nobody had believed in the least that the model was really missing, everybody had believed that models have so many options, and so many places where to find these options, that if models are not in one fine place, they must be in some other fine places

To Achieve Perfection

There had been rumors that the model was suspected of entanglement in flaws, and had been punished or kidnapped

There were other rumors of the dark side of the model, for which the model had probably suffered violence or injustice

But the truth was that all the

rumors were spread by The Angry Bag and The Hater

To Achieve Perfection

As the model was not there for the show that summer, her dress was given to another model to present

The missing model was praised with much regret, a story was made up on the spur of the moment and illustrated with a pattern on the dress, and the critics praised the dress forgetting all about the missing model

To Achieve Perfection

There was a Moonflower that lamented the disappearance of the model even after she was found in a seaside resort

But it was because moonflowers only flourish in the moonlight and need sad stories

People could hear the laughter of the missing model on the beach, the gossip of the angry bag, and the whisper of the petals of the blooming moon flower, long after the show had ended and all the dresses were in the wardrobe

To Achieve Perfection When the moon was full, when

the moon rose above the horizon like a white monster, when the moon accompanied, from its standstill position, the dashing train, with the view up to the sky changing its angle to the clouds to see them going back and the moon flying ahead and parallel to the train, there was a whisper that all had achieved perfection, though not the perfection they needed

To Achieve Perfection

An Owl also spoke in the night telling the true stories about the missing model, about the bag that had been new in a previous show, and about the moonflower that had lived in a home before the reconstruction of the family and household, but owls are only heard by the trees and by the shadows of the night, never by the ghosts that care nothing about what owls know or have seen, or suppose to have happened

To Achieve Perfection

There was a whisper among the trees about a rivalry between the missing model and the one that took the clothes to wear in the summer show, the owl tried hard to hear that whisper of the trees, but the night in places where models disappear is so dense that no whisper is heard but by those who already know the truth that models rarely sit but on a deckchair by the sea