A little embarrassed by her own excitement at the prospect of finding lilacs, Aimée paused to tighten her shoelaces—like a cat who, on realizing that she is being watched while in an undignified tussle with her own tail, stops, with conspicuous indifference, to clean her paws—before rounding the corner. She made a left turn and…there they were: just as certain a sign of spring as a charm of goldfinches thronging the nyger feeder or Eustace Tilley, monocle held aloft as he examines a butterfly (ephemeral as the season itself), on the cover of The New Yorker.
