At least the roast was not burned and the potatoes seemed to be browning nicely for once. Oh please, please let us be calm, she implored the air. Let us be kind. Keep Damon from getting angry. Make Edward understand—but the custard looked rather queer. And it was high time she carameled the sauce, too. We are children, she thought, lost in the wood. It is time we grew up, she thought, banging about in the kitchen drawer for that wooden spoon which always disappeared. But as she ladled the sauce in the immemorial gesture (so she had watched her mother do it in the big sunny kitchen in Milton), she felt calmed. Calm welled up in her. We’ll manage, she told herself. We’ll find a way. For we really love each other. That is a fact. She clung to this fact. Can people who really love each other be divided? The question lost itself in the delicious syrupy brown mixture, just the right consistency, thick but not sticky—and then she heard the bell. Let Damon go. Let them meet each other first alone.

“Darling Edward,” she said as she came in with the ice cubes a few minutes later. “Bless you for coming,” she said, carried forward on her kitchen thoughts so that she found herself kissing him. Then, embarrassed by what she had done, she explained, “I was thinking of Paris, 1937—do you remember? It’s because of this dress.…” She sank down into a chair.

“Of course I remember,” Edward stood with his back to the fire, his hands in his pockets. “It’s a charming dress, Julia, a work of genius——”

“It must be, if it’s lasted all this time,” and she sighed, sighed with pleasure, with relief, for it seemed as if the enormous tension of the last days had vanished, had been dissipated like a cloud. There was Damon, stirring the martinis and smiling, and there was Edward standing at the fire, just as if nothing had happened.

“Poor darling, you’ve never had another, have you? And we thought we would be so rich, at least I did. A professor’s salary”—suddenly he laughed—“what children we were!”

“It was a good time,” Julia said, as he handed her a martini. “You don’t need to feel so superior.”

“A very good time,” Edward echoed and lifted his glass to her.

“The year before Munich,” Damon turned to them from the little table where he had been mixing the drinks. “I wonder—was it really such a good time?”

Edward considered this for a moment. “No,” he said earnestly, “perhaps it wasn’t. But our star was in the ascendant just the same. We were rising in that falling world—why do I say that?” He stopped. “But there was solidarity, Damon, you must admit. And one felt useful. That summer in Paris I really accomplished rather a lot, in one way and another.”