Not for long. Following the Draft Riots that summer of ’63, she’d quite decided that she wouldn’t go to see him. She knew that when he’d seduced her on the beach on Coney Island, he hadn’t meant anything serious by it. She didn’t mind. And once back in the city, her old life in the Master household took over at once, and after a week she even supposed that he was fading from her mind.

So it was really only on a whim, she told herself, that one Saturday early in August, having a free day and no other engagements, she happened to look in on his studio in the Bowery.

He was just finishing a portrait of a young man when she came in. Greeting her politely, as though she were his next customer, he asked her if she’d wait in the larger studio. She’d sat down on the sofa there, then got up to look at the books on the table. There were no poems on the table that day, just a newspaper and an old copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. She’d read the book, so she contented herself with reading the newspaper. She heard the young man leave, and Theodore busying himself about the studio.

Then he entered, and stood there smiling.

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I happened to be passing,” she said. “I said I’d look in.”

“That was my last customer for the day. Would you like to eat something?”

“If you like,” she said, and stood up.

He came over to her.

“We can go out to eat in a little while,” he said. Then he began to kiss her.

Their affair lasted through that month and the next. Of course, there were only certain times when she could meet him, but it was surprising how, with a little ingenuity, they could contrive to get together. And on her free days they went out walking, or he took her to concerts or the theater, or other things he thought she might like. Now and then he’d explain to her how he took his photographs, the way he tried to compose them or arrange the light, and she discovered that she had some natural understanding for such things, so that quite soon she could tell which was the best work and sometimes how it was achieved.

She knew he would not marry her. She was not sure she’d even wish it. But she knew that she interested him, and that he had affection for her.

They did not tell Gretchen.

It was in the middle of September that Sean came to see her. They walked round Gramercy Park together.

“So what’s going on with Theodore Keller?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Yes you do. I know all about it, Mary.”