Over on the armchair, Sandy lifted her head and licked a paw. Irene set down the hem she’d been picking and smoothed it over the bump of her knee.

“No,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to tell you about Sam and me.”

Morrow held her gaze for a second or two, just to see if she’d back down, she thought. So she didn’t. He turned away and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “All right, then. I can see you’re tired. Get yourself some rest. We’ll discuss all this in the morning over breakfast.”

“You and me and Sam.”

“Of course.”

Morrow’s jacket lay over the back of the armchair. He rose and hooked it with his finger. As he picked up his hat, he looked Irene’s way and smiled.

“I like the new hairdo, Miss Foster. It suits you.”

The hairdo, of course, was to become iconic: a symbol of the age and the women who peopled it, of this daring new generation of females. To millions of admirers, those short curls meant freedom and courage. Certainly they attracted attention. In the many photographs that survive from the press conference after the Centauri’s miraculous arrival in Sydney, Irene Foster’s hair seizes the camera’s fascination: a riotous gold mop glimmering under the lights like some kind of beacon for the brave new world.

Naturally, the reporters wanted to know how and when and why she had cut her hair. And Irene—who was still exhausted, remember, who had napped only briefly before Morrow knocked again on the door of her hotel suite to summon her to her public—let down her guard for a single sentence, the only sentence. She glanced at Sam, who sat at her side; Sam glanced at her, and they shared a smile. “Sam cut it for me, on our third day on Howland,” she said. “Long hair just gets in the way of everything, doesn’t it?”

The photographers present that day were not stupid. A cavalcade of flashbulbs and camera shutters captured that shared smile, which was reproduced on millions of sheets of newsprint within twenty-four hours, was thrown up on thousands of newsreel screens within a week, was printed in countless magazines and books over the years, was later expanded to gigantic proportions for museum exhibits and popular art. It became, in the collective imagination, a visual shorthand for two separate though related aspects of twentieth century life: for the unique and private connection that exists between two people deeply in love and for a moment in history when an equal standing between man and woman—the possibility for adventure shared, for genuine partnership—became possible.

Humans being as they are, of course, the fact that both Sam and Irene married other people only made it all the more intriguing.