Chapter 5: Miss Athena Chase Explains the Situation More Competently Than Anyone Else Has Managed

The subscription library on Albemarle Street opened its doors at nine o'clock on Friday mornings and admitted, by long establishment, only those persons possessing either a current membership ticket or the particular variety of self-possession that made the door-man disinclined to ask for one. Miss Petra Calloway, arriving at half past nine with a book she intended to return and another she intended to acquire, presented her ticket with the brisk economy of someone who had slept badly and was determined not to show it.

She had, in fact, slept rather well. This was the detail she found most troubling.

One did not, as a general rule, receive the intelligence that one's deceased father was a sea-god, attend a divine rout at which the sacred vault of Olympian authority was discovered empty, and then sleep eight uninterrupted hours. The appropriate response involved insomnia, or at the very least some productive period of ceiling-examination. That she had instead managed both dinner and a dreamless unconsciousness struck her, in the grey light of Friday morning, as evidence of either admirable equanimity or a constitutional stubbornness that refused to allow catastrophe the satisfaction of disrupting her sleep schedule.