I don’t want to talk about it, he said. I feel bad for her.

I don’t, Lilian said, and burrowed against him.

He ran his hand over her hair and tipped her head back. His face was grey in the window’s light.

She had many questions for him, but wanted to show that she trusted him, and didn’t say a word. She would have liked to tell him things — that she would wait, that her life was stretching out and she saw him in it. Of course she did not dare. She remembered Dolly’s warnings and thought of all her mother had told her. Resting her cheek on Walter Vail’s chest, it was hard not to feel that all the advice she’d been given and the warnings she’d heard were for girls other than herself and applied to boys other than Walter Vail. Boys, when you got up close, were quite different from the picture Mrs. Eliot or even Dolly Cushing painted. Boys did not care in the least if your fingernails were polished or if your hair was brushed. In fact, Walter Vail seemed to feel oppositely. She liked thinking of him and of how he was different from other boys. He seemed so clear about what he wanted, he did not falter.

These thoughts drifted as unformed clouds through Lilian’s head. She had slipped into a dizzy repose — somehow they’d gotten onto the window seat — and was reclining beside Walter Vail who had propped up a pillow behind them. His voice rumbled through his torso, reverberating against her ear. He was asking her — she looked up — in a gentle voice, and her heart rose hearing it, if she wanted to take off her coat — she still had the heavy thing on! — so he could feel her more closely this one last time.

14 • Concerning the cathedral at Rheims

14 • Concerning the
cathedral at Rheims

HAVING FELT a great change in herself, Lilian no longer confided in Dolly Cushing and reserved her outpouring for the more discreet Jane Olney.

Jane had returned from Florida no more tan than when she’d left. She was a bony girl who dressed in simple linen shirts and wore her hair in a tattered bun atop her head. She often held a book loosely in one hand and directed her attention to it when her interest in the general conversation lagged. Lilian told her about the evenings with Walter Vail, finding new things in the retelling. I’ll never forget floated inside her and she felt that with those evenings added to her she was more than she’d been before. Jane sat and listened without once telling Lilian what she ought to have done.

What an exciting time you’ve had, she said. He sounds like a lucky fellow.

They were walking around the Olneys’ pond in Brookline. Lilian would be spending the night as she often did.