“Good. Getting warm.”

“Got it. Autumn ’ninety-four. The Signature line. Kate Moss modeled it, in beige, not black. It came out number forty-two.”

“Forty-three. Very good, Pixie. So—am I late enough now? What d’you think?”

Pixie grinned, and consulted her watch.

“Twenty minutes. Give it another five maybe? I mean, if you’re going to be rude, be really rude, right?”

“Exactly.” Lindsay returned the grin.

She gave it ten.

“Have some coffee.” Rowland McGuire lifted his feet off his desk and rose to his full six feet five inches. Lindsay gave him a look of calculated ice, its effects slightly marred by the necessity of looking up.

“If you have time,” she said. “As you know—I’m running late.”

McGuire let this pass with only a brief glance at his watch. “Sit down,” he said over his shoulder. “Sorry about the mess. Just kick those books out of the way. Review copies. All junk.”

Lindsay glared at his broad-shouldered back. She saw that unlike every other man in the building, McGuire seemed capable of making coffee for himself. Another of his ruses, she decided—and one designed to impress. She was certain that had she not been there, a female secretary would have been summoned, one of the clutch of assistants, all new, who sat outside McGuire’s office and trembled at his approach.

Without comment she threaded her way to his desk. Her progress was impeded by stacks of papers, piles of books. In two months McGuire had transformed this department, and its efficiency. Pre-McGuire, the features department had been an amiable place, populated by talented young men who avoided strenuous activity and spent much of the day when not lunching with contacts congratulating themselves on the fact that they had avoided the demands of the newsroom where people were actually required to work. Since the advent of McGuire, these loafers had departed. They had been replaced, Lindsay had noted sourly, by a large number of attractive young women, all of whom were rumored to be ambitious, frighteningly bright—and in love with Rowland McGuire. That morning Lindsay had run the gauntlet of their assessing stares; she had been extremely glad to be wearing the Cazarès suit.

McGuire’s office was equally transformed. Formerly a place of humming modernistic display, all chrome and black wood, it now resembled a scholar’s bolthole circa 1906. McGuire’s state-of-the-art IBM computer was there, it was true, but it was virtually invisible; every surface in the room was piled with papers, magazines, and books. Sitting down by the desk, Lindsay squinted at the titles and was annoyed to see that the pile nearest her consisted of government white papers surmounted by a dog-eared, clearly much-consulted edition of Proust. In French.

She leaned forward and inspected the papers McGuire had been reading when she came in; she could see a large green file, a pile of faxes, and that morning’s edition of the Times, folded back at the crossword. McGuire, it was whispered, completed these crosswords in fifteen minutes flat; she now saw that the insufferable man filled in the answers in ink.