“Your son’s a good boy too,” said Marc. “None of us has anything against him.”

“Your son does you credit,” Marie agreed.

“The point is this,” said Hadley. “If my son wants to propose, and if Claire wants to accept him—which it seems none of us knows—what are we all going to do? Are we going to forbid it?”

Marc indicated that he wasn’t worried personally. Marie was silent.

“You know,” Hadley added quietly, “I can stop it. I could put my son on a boat to America tomorrow if it’s necessary.”

“You realize, don’t you, that if they marry, your son will probably take my only child three thousand miles away across the ocean, where I shall never see her, or my grandchildren. Quite apart from the fact that I need her at the store.”

“Then perhaps I should act,” said Hadley.

Marie shrugged.

“Let her decide for herself,” she said miserably.

The next few days were not easy for Marie. It was as though a spell had been cast over the last three months. The shock of the first encounter with Frank Hadley Jr., then the excitement of his father’s arrival, had blinded her to the cold, grim reality that if her daughter fell in love with young Frank, he would take her away forever and she would be alone for the rest of her life. And when she thought of that, she cursed the young man’s coming.

She asked Claire what she thought of young Frank the next evening, when Claire was reading a magazine, and Claire looked up and said he was nice enough, which was clearly an evasion.

“Well, don’t go falling in love with him, unless you want to find yourself cut off from everything you love, in America—which all the Americans seem to be trying to get away from,” she said, as though she were joking, but they both knew she wasn’t.

“I’d like to see New York,” said Claire, casually, turning back to her magazine. And Marie wanted to continue the conversation, but realized that it was no good, and silently cursed the fact that the little scene in the garden at Fontainebleau had left her, forever, in a false position with her daughter.

She wished there was someone to comfort her, but Marc was no real support, and she didn’t want to share her thoughts with de Cygne. And Hadley didn’t call.

It was three days after the meeting that she went to Hadley’s apartment. She really hadn’t meant to. She hadn’t planned it at all.

She’d had a lunchtime meeting with a designer who had a little studio on the rue de Chazelles, just above the Parc Monceau. As she came out, she saw that despite the fact that it was November, it was a bright afternoon with a wintry sun in the sky, so she decided to walk through the park, as she had done so many times as a child, and continue down to the boulevard Haussmann and across to her office.