Stice stuck to the window; Kenkle's verdict
Socks or no, I went forward into the really wet mopped area and tried to make out my face’s expression in the east window. It was now too light, though, outside, off all the snow. I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.
Context
The Hal-at-the-mirror paragraph — though the instrument here is not a mirror but the east window. Kenkle has just read Hal's face out loud — "Your face is a hilarity-face. It's working hilariously" — while Hal feels nothing resembling hilarity; Hal composes himself deadly-somber and gets "Somewheres now between amused and cach-inated. Mirth-ful, perhaps." So Hal goes to the glass to see for himself what his face is broadcasting, and the check fails optically: too much snow-light behind the pane, and the reflection returns him "sketchy and faint… tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white." The scene's whole apparatus conspires — a window Stice is frozen to by his forehead, breath-fog that denies him any reflection at all, and now a reflection that overexposes into a ghost exactly when Hal most needs to audit his own expression. Provenance: this is the scene tail the splitter restored from raw 168 (header apparatus quoted in Flags); it sits after the raw's final [p. 876] marker, span per standard rule.