She liked to dress him the way she thought he ought to look. She’d bought him a blue scarf that he looked very nice in. But he had this terrible old hat, and he absolutely refused to stop wearing it. She didn’t really mind—it just became a challenge to figure out how long it would take to get him to give it up. In fact, she liked the challenge. If he’d given it up without a fight, she’d have been disappointed.

So how would she feel if Charlie were her husband? Pretty good, actually. As for having a little boy that was like Charlie, or a little girl he could dote on—why, that seemed the most wonderful thing in the world.

But what about religion? Would the Master family insist that she or the children be Christians? That she couldn’t agree to. However, Charlie hadn’t raised the question, so he couldn’t care about it that much, she supposed. She’d expected that old Mrs. Master would be the one really to object, but unless Rose was bluffing, Sarah’s Jewishness no longer bothered her that much. If Christians used the term, Sarah thought, the Episcopalian Masters appeared to be secular rather than observant.

As for herself, though she loved her tradition, Sarah reckoned that she could probably live in Manhattan without too much difficulty as a secular Jew, and even bring her children up that way—so long as they could experience their heritage whenever they visited her parents. If Charlie would make that compromise, then she could cope. She knew it could be done. She had friends in the city with mixed marriages who seemed to be happy enough.

But that still left the big problem. Her parents. Her father especially. Everyone knew the views of Daniel Adler.

Might it help that her father liked Charlie? “I was worried about you going into the city,” he had told her. “But the gallery is serious, this I can see. And your client Mr. Master—that is a distinguished man, a fine man.” There was no question, her father had liked Charlie a lot. Perhaps that would count for something.

Besides, she could remind her father, his grandchildren would still be Jewish. They’d have a Jewish mother. Maybe Daniel Adler could reconcile himself to having secular grandchildren, so long as they came to Seder at his house where he could educate them. “After all,” she could hear herself telling him, “this way, they still have the choice as they grow older. There’s nothing to stop a child of mine becoming a rabbi even, if he wants to.”

These were the hopes, the calculations, the little scenarios Sarah invented for herself as she sat in her home and thought about the man she loved.