“THE PUBLIC DOES LIKE THIS SORT OF THING,” Davis Barnard said from the sideboard where he was pouring whiskey into coffee cups. The newspaperman was referring to the funeral tidbits Diana had fed him the day before. He had a dark, dramatic brow, a rather pinched nose, and he filled out his waistcoat in a way that, from his own, oft-expressed point of view, symbolized good living. “But it is my personal belief that at this point they would be far more interested in the personal diary of Diana Holland, avec illustrations. You, my dear, could sell papers.”

Diana smiled distantly from the daybed by the window, where she lounged in a long navy skirt and a shell-pink blouse that fluttered around her small, curved frame. She had come to know Mr. Barnard’s narrow quarters, on the third floor of an apartment building on East Sixteenth Street, quite well: the cracks in the twilight blue paint; the rows of framed prints covering the fissures as best they could; the large cut-glass punch bowl on the cabinet; the boxing gloves strung up over the fireplace, which, in the summer, was used as a storage place for books. There were several books in that pile that she had a mind to rescue before her departure on Tuesday. “Ah, but that is all talk,” she replied, and turned toward the window, where great puffs of white clouds were wandering across a devastatingly clear sky.

Davis gave her a look and then brought her and his friend—George Grass, the writer, sitting on the cane-backed chair on the other side of the window from Diana’s daybed—their coffee. “I don’t believe a word of it, do you, Grass?”

Grass put his long, horselike face close to his mug and drank. All of him was long and horselike, and his far-reaching legs were crossed in the manner of a seasoned flaneur. Upon his arrival half an hour ago, Diana had determined he was ugly, but interesting.

“I have no idea what you two are talking of.” He extended his porcelain cup, in a congenial gesture, so that it made a clinking noise against Diana’s. “Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.”

Diana tossed her head of abbreviated curls and laughed; Davis made a sour face. “It is the tool that bought the whiskey you are enjoying,” he retorted, but Diana could see that he didn’t really mind. That he was a hack was one of Davis’s favorite jokes.

“Don’t think I am not grateful.” Grass smiled, revealing his brown teeth. “Art never paid for anything.”

“Come, though, Miss Holland,” Davis went on, ignoring the sad turn of his friend’s comments. “The next time you run half way around the globe, I don’t want to find out via a telegram asking for money, and demanding that I print your official alibi in the papers.”

In days she would be gone again. She could hardly wait. To her, it felt like years since she had been alone with Henry; it was a special kind of agony, being so long removed from their secret society of two. At night, she fell asleep imagining just what kind of kiss would join them together again. Plus, disapproving eyes and vitriolic murmurs followed her everywhere these days, and her mother charged around the house in silent fury, waiting for the story to officially break and for her family to be ruined once and for all. It was not a situation in which she longed to linger.

“I can see the joke, Miss Holland, playing just under the surface.” Grass’s piercing gaze was on her, not unkindly. Diana tried to put on an enigmatical expression, but a glowing quality gave her away. “You’re up to something!”

“Don’t be angry, Mr. Barnard.” Her eyes darted to her old friend, standing just beyond the cane-backed chair. She sank her teeth into her plump lower lip at the thought of what she was confessing. “But I do have an escape plan.”

“Where are you going?” Davis asked sadly. She had long suspected that his affection for her was too large to be based solely on her ability to collect stories about the doings of the well-heeled classes, and tried her best to be not quite so lovely.

“To Paris, this time for real.”

“Alone?”

She blushed.

“Don’t ask her that,” Grass put in. “We will know soon enough,” he added philosophically.

“Will you still send me telegrams, when you are eating snails and trading romantic secrets with the viscomtesse de blah-bitty-blah?”

“No, she will not.” Grass’s voice had grown excited with the picture he was conjuring. “She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations into richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories.”

“But what will she eat, dear Grass?” Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically.

“Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy.” He put down his cup and leaned toward the young lady in question. On his breath, there was the hint of a tooth going rotten. She was surprised by the urgency with which he addressed her case, although she knew she should be flattered, and after all, it was a very lively life. “My dear, you have made a good decision. Here you would be a pretty wife who everyone would forget in time. There—there you will become some ultimate version of yourself. Take it from me, no American can really see himself, or understand his country, when he is here, in the middle of all the brutal hubbub and hectic commerce. It effaces everything. You will see when you go. France is a very different country—each and every cobblestone there has played its part in history. Your eyes will be wide open.”

When he had finished, his mouth remained open a few seconds, and his eyes were shining with the intensity of his words. She tried to appear worthy of such an impassioned speech. She wished Henry were there, to hear about their future home, to grow excited about the cobblestones and baguette and red wine. Then her head filled up with Henry, and she began to wonder if he was too miserable, if Penelope was being really horrible, and how many times that day he had paused to imagine Diana disrobed. “To wide-open eyes, then,” she said, raising her coffee cup.

They all toasted again. “To wide-open eyes,” Grass and Barnard repeated in tandem.

“But you must promise you will miss me, Mr. Barnard, or I shall cry myself to sleep all across the Atlantic Ocean and doubt my choice,” she went on gaily.

“Ah, Miss Di, we will all of us miss you more than words can convey.” As Barnard and Grass turned to other topics, she found that her imagination kept drifting to a small window, above a twisting little street, which she pushed open in the early morning, when her body, like Henry’s beside her, was still soft with slumber.