She felt dirtied by her own curiosity, sickened by the kind of details people bandied around. Beyond and behind such feelings were others.

Deeply troubled, Lindsay crossed the quay and leaned over the balustrade, looking down at the Seine. Prior to the conversation with Pixie, she had been trying to convince herself that her own instincts the previous night had been wrong. Now she felt doubly unsure. One aspect of Pixie’s report worried her, and that was the description of Rowland’s firing Gini, and the manner in which that action was performed.

Lindsay knew just how vulnerable Gini was to criticism from those she liked or admired. It was a legacy, of course, from her father, from all those years when she had tried to prove her worth, and win his affection, and failed.

Lindsay had never dared to say this to Gini, but she had always believed that this inheritance had been a strong contributing factor in her attraction to Pascal Lamartine. Lindsay might not have heard all the details of Gini’s original involvement with Pascal, for Gini was reticent, but she had heard the story of how Gini had first met him, in that press bar in Beirut, and it seemed to her there was an obvious aspect to that story to which Gini, and presumably Pascal, were totally blind.

What had ignited their affair? It was Pascal’s hostility to Gini’s father that had ignited it, and Gini’s intuition, subsequently confirmed, that Pascal Lamartine was contemptuous of Gini’s father, at whose shrine Gini had painfully worshiped for so long. At the very moment when Gini’s own doubts about her father were beginning, along came a handsome, impassioned, and very romantic man who loathed and despised Sam Hunter on sight—and said so to Gini in no uncertain terms.

As one figure of authority began to crumble before her eyes, Gini replaced him with another—what if, now, Gini was about to, or was in the process of, replacing that second mentor with a third?

Lindsay began to pace back and forth, feeling more agitated now. In order to love, she thought, Gini—like many women—had not only to admire, but also to feel she could learn. She had to look up to the man she loved, admiring his gifts, his character, his intelligence, his moral worth—and believing always that he was better endowed in these respects than she was herself.

Such a female weakness, Lindsay thought, aware that it was also her own. Gini might preach equality, and imagine she practiced it, but Lindsay believed that too much equality in love would be something Gini would loathe. Nothing appealed to Gini so much as a teacher, and nothing was so likely to attract her to a man as some reprimand from him she knew was deserved.

Would a bitter dressing-down from Rowland McGuire have a deep effect on Gini? Lindsay frowned down at the gray water, knowing that—if she herself were truthful—it would certainly have influenced her. Then she realized: in Gini’s case, that particular question had already been answered, and in front of her eyes.