“Perhaps it would help, Rowland,” she began finally, her tone excessively polite, “if I explained to you some of the realities of my job. I go to the collections to report clothes. To report trends. I look at cut and color and fabric and line. I’m expert at that. It helps that clothes interest me. I like clothes. So do the hundreds of thousands of women who read my pages every week. The female readers this paper needs. The ones who gladden the hearts of the ad agencies, Rowland, the agencies that buy space in this paper, and help pay your salary as well as mine.”

“I’m aware of the economics of this industry, thank you,” McGuire put in.

Lindsay fought down a rising urge to lean across his desk and slap him.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Take a look at your features output, Rowland, before you preach. Last Saturday, for instance. You ran a long piece on Chechnya, and a piece on the Clintons…”

“So?”

“You also ran a report in the car column on the new Aston-Martin, a piece on an exclusive Thai beach resort under travel, and a comparison of fifteen brands of virgin olive oil in the food column, the first sentence of which was so damn pompous and pretentious, it made me choke. You allowed that ghastly girl who reviews restaurants for you—a ghastly girl you brought on to this paper—to devote an entire column to some damn fancy restaurant outside Oxford, where she and her latest boyfriend had just blown nearly two hundred pounds of your department’s budget. On lunch. That’s not frivolous? That’s not obscene? Come on, Rowland. Don’t give me this shit.”

There was a silence. Grandes dames, Lindsay thought, would not have used that last epithet. Too bad, she thought. She now felt much better. No regrets. McGuire, she noted, had colored. But if her remarks had struck home, he recovered quickly. He gave her a brief glinting glance, then—to her annoyance—laughed.

“A hit,” he said. “A palpable hit. However”—he leaned across the desk—“the ghastly girl retained her critical faculties. She gave the béarnaise sauce the thumbs-down.”

“Big deal.”

“… And our motoring correspondent got tough over the Aston’s instrumentation design—”

“Give me a break. He drooled over that damn Aston.”

“The olive oil article, however—now, there I’m with you. Appalling. Unreadable. Precious beyond belief.”

“And you’ve done something about that, have you? In your capacity as features editor?”

“Sure I have.” He met her gaze levelly. “You hadn’t heard? I fired that columnist this week.”

There was another silence, longer this time. Lindsay sat very still. She looked at the green eyes and the tweed jacket and the piles of books. She thought briefly of school fees and mortgage payments and leaking pipes.

“Is that a threat?” she said eventually, enunciating the words clearly in her calmest voice.

McGuire seemed astonished. He gave her a blank look, ran his hands through his hair, then began to speak rapidly.

Lindsay was not listening. She rose. She felt as if she were trapped in some cold, icy place, where the air was too thin, so it was hard to breathe.