She stopped; Rowland had just yawned.

“Rowland, please—just try. This is important. If you can’t read the signature, you won’t understand. Now, tell me what you see here.”

“I don’t like that turban thing the model’s wearing. It looks absurd.”

“Rowland, forget the turban. Look at the dress. Try to see its component parts. Try to read its language. Try to see the story this dress is telling. Isn’t it romantic? Doesn’t it make you think of St. Petersburg balls? Think…” She cast around desperately. “Think of War and Peace, Rowland. The ballroom scenes in that. Think of Natasha’s nighttime sleigh-ride through the snow.”

A glint of comprehension began to appear in Rowland’s eyes.

“Yes, maybe…” he said, frowning. “I begin to see… You’ve read War and Peace, then?”

Lindsay sighed. “I may not have read classics at Oxford,” she said in patient tones, “but I’m not completely uneducated, Rowland. Of course I’ve read War and Peace. As a matter of fact, I read a lot. I read all the time.”

Rowland looked at her with new interest. “Do you?” he said. “What are you reading now?”

Lindsay lowered her eyes. On her bedside table she kept the books she intended to read and the books she usually ended up reading, side by side. At the top of the pile at the moment was a fat airport romance, six hundred pages of love and heartbreak, which soothed her at the end of a hard day. Its author’s style might lack grace, but the plot was deft and the characters dramatic. Their emotions were violent; last Thursday, on page 345, the hero had died; tired Lindsay had cried.

“John Updike,” she said. “The last of the Rabbit ones, you know.”

Rowland’s face lit up the instant she mentioned the name. He began speaking; Lindsay, resolving to start that novel that very night, interrupted fast.

“Rowland, I know you’d prefer to discuss books, but now’s not the time. Please, I need you to concentrate on this.”

Rowland apologized. He bent over the photograph of a ball gown designed two decades earlier, and stared at it with fierce concentration. He seemed determined to deconstruct its female codes. Lindsay, amused, watched him apply his intellect to it.

“It has both male and female elements,” he said at last. “The dress itself couldn’t be more feminine. But Cazarès has married it with a man’s waistcoat—with the kind of garment a Cossack might wear.”

“That’s excellent.” Lindsay shot him a look of approval. “You’re learning. That’s the essence of the Cazarès style—the union of apparent opposites. Male and female, rough and smooth, exotic and austere, chaste and impure. That’s her grammar, if you like. Now—keep concentrating. Look at this second photograph here.”

Feeling nervous, she drew out the article she had brought from her own files and laid it in front of him. The picture accompanying her interview was full-page. It showed a regal, white-haired, and still-beautiful woman standing in a resplendent drawing room. Draped across the chair next to her was a dress, a long dress, with an accompanying overjacket trimmed with fur.