Then there was the matter of the wife. No sane newspaperman was going to print anything to besmirch the sanctity of the American marriage, but that Mrs. Samuel Mallory was something else. She would sit down for an interview in her prim, middle-class parlor in Oakland, arranging herself and her small, angelic daughter, whose hair was like a cloud of pale gold, on the sofa in their white dresses and ribbons. She was a handsome woman, there was no doubt about that, dark haired and almond eyed, but you could see at a glance that she must’ve been ten years older than her husband, and those ten years had begun to tell.

She would relate to some reporter how she’d been the widow of one of the other pilots in Mr. Mallory’s squadron, and how she and Mr. Mallory comforted each other after the war, and how that friendship grew into love. What was that? Did she trust her husband? Of course she did! She trusted him absolutely! She believed Miss Foster was a woman of integrity, passionate about flying, and Mr. Mallory was a man of honor. She had no objections whatsoever to the proposed flight. Mr. Mallory always carried a navigator on these adventures. If that navigator happened to be a woman, why, these were modern times, weren’t they? A man and woman could surely labor together as friends, without allowing any base inclination to intrude between them.

The reporter would nod earnestly and take all these words down in his notebook, which he repeated verbatim, without a hint of irony, in his story the next day. It was for the reader, after all, to make of Mrs. Mallory what he would. It was for the reader to determine whether a man should fly all the way to Sydney, Australia, in the company of some doll he wasn’t married to, and whether his wife was a fool to let him do it. Frankly, the newspapermen didn’t care, one way or another. The story made good copy, that’s what they cared about.

As for Irene herself, she hadn’t even met Mrs. Mallory. In all those weeks since March, when Mr. Morrow had first agreed to finance the Sydney expedition—all those weeks while she and Sam had planned and trained and flown together in almost daily proximity—Sam’s wife hadn’t once come to visit. Instead, Sam flew the repaired Papillon north to Oakland once every month or so, in order to keep their affairs in order, and to spend time with their daughter, Pixie. He stayed for two or three nights at a time. As for what he did there, Irene never asked. She didn’t feel she had the right to ask.