The Shooting Party

A man walks into a newspaper office with a manuscript under his arm, asks the editor to print it, and swears every word of it happened. What follows is his account of one summer on a rotting estate by a lake: a count drinking himself blind before noon, a forester going quietly mad among his pines, and that forester's daughter, the girl in red, who marries the estate manager, a kind widower more than twice her age, for the house and the money, and knows she has ruined herself before the wedding candles burn down.