The interior of the house might have been a museum of the decorative arts. Each painting and piece of furniture had been selected carefully. I inquired about the large black nude that graced the entrance hall, the voluptuous figure formed in cold marble. “Yes, that’s rather nice,” she said. “My husband bought it, in Paris.”

Above the carved mantel was a large painting of a beautiful aristocratic lady, who bore a slight resemblance to my hostess. “Who’s she?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s nobody. We just bought her somewhere.”

“It’s such a beautiful house,” said Annie. “So much history. We both come from California, where prewar means it was built before Vietnam.”

“Washington is quite different, isn’t it?” she said contentedly.

The doorbell rang. The other guests were beginning to arrive. Our hostess departed to greet them.

When Philip Sellinger and his wife, Barbara, entered the drawing room, he headed straight for me. He seemed almost to glide as he made his way across the carpet—I noted the silver hair, the bright blue eyes, the perfect clothes, the shine on his shoes. Like Mrs. Parsons, he was one of nature’s aristocrats.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “Elsbeth thinks you’re charming, and she usually hates reporters.”

I gathered that was a compliment. A waiter took orders for drinks. Sellinger had a scotch and water; I thought I had better stick to club soda, at least until I got my feet on the ground.

“How’s business?” I asked the publisher. It was a simple question, but it was as if I had pulled open a trapdoor: out tumbled all the accumulated worries and frustrations.

“Business is awful,” he said. “Absolutely rotten. You heard about the buyouts, I suppose. What’s the Washington bureau saying about them?”

I wanted to be honest with Sellinger. I didn’t know him very well, but it made no sense to start off our relationship by telling him lies.

“People are scared,” I answered. “Some of them think layoffs are next. The gossips say the paper is losing money.”

“The gossips are right. We may end up with a loss this quarter, just between us girls, although it may wash out on paper when the accountants are done. But the stock market already knows the truth, which is that the paper hasn’t been making any money for months. That’s why the damn stock price is so low. The analysts think we’re so caught up in our glorious newspaper culture that we’ll never cut costs the way an ordinary business would.”

“Are the analysts right?” I asked warily. Cutting costs sounded like a bad idea to me.