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In 1921 Beth came across the flagged terrace, her geranium colored dress taut with fury. She was running, then she saw the man in the wicker chair and she slowed to a walk and approached him, repressing the fury although it still lurked in her walk, though not in her voice.

“Hello,” she said, “Dear.”

The man in the chair was methodically sucking tea into himself. A gardener was trimming a box hedge below the pool, a crisp maid fluttered in the purlieus of the sunset at the back of the scene, the invariable feminine complement to whatever picture the man in the chair filled, servants with dreams engendered rosily by Scullery out of Moving Pictures watching him from behind window curtains, daughters of preferred stock and six percent.