When Hemingway stopped, she whispered to Frank that he had written it, and he whispered back that he didn’t know Hemingway was going to do that, and he shouldn’t have shown it to him.

Then Hemingway said that he’d never read anything which conveyed the sounds and smell and feel of a place so well and so simply, and that it really made one want to know more about the characters, and especially the girl, who was still—he glanced toward Claire with a grin—tantalizingly mysterious. And he nodded to Frank, so that everyone understood he was the author.

Later that evening Frank took her home, and when he left her at the entrance to the building, he kissed her on the cheek, but he pressed her arms lightly as he did so.

“Hemingway really likes you,” he said. And she knew this meant that he did too.

When Marie thought back to the last days in Fontainebleau, she could almost have cried out in vexation.

When Marc brought young Frank Hadley to the house, and she had given him Claire’s room, and put Claire in the boudoir beyond her own bedroom, she had told herself that it was not only a simple solution, but it protected Claire from the young man during the night. The only door to the boudoir led into her own room. No one could slip in or out of the boudoir during the night without crossing her bedroom, and she was a light sleeper.

So her daughter was safe. And of course it also followed—she admitted it freely to herself—that, with her daughter denied him, Frank was more likely to turn his thoughts to herself.

And why not? Why shouldn’t she? If he was discreet. If she’d let the father slip through her fingers, why not the son?

It hadn’t been difficult to interest him. Showing him things in the kitchen or about the house, taking him to the market and walking about the town with him, introducing him to the rich, sensuous world of provincial France in summer. She’d kept her figure. If her face contained lines, they were interesting ones. As a Frenchwoman, she walked with a poise and lightness that was different from the frank, easy movement of an American girl. All this was heady stuff for any young man looking for adventure.

As for herself, after the years of being alone, it made her feel young in a way that she had never thought she would again. As she looked at her face in the glass in the soft lamplight in the evening, and shook her hair loose, she thought the face she saw wouldn’t look bad on a pillow. One night, when Claire was asleep, she’d slipped out of her nightdress and surveyed herself naked in front of her long mirror, and had been pleased to see that her breasts still looked so firm, and that she hardly had to pull her stomach in. When she turned to look behind, she saw only a few dimples, nothing much.