The man’s name was Jackson Winthrop, Win to his friends (“You’re all Wins and Hens, aren’t you?” Monica said. “Is it a code?”); he owned a farm on the far side of Olcottsville; he was in his late forties; divorced three years before. He described himself with a self-congratulatory sort of irony as a Bucks County gentleman farmer though he no longer farmed and if he was gentle it was surely not by choice. “Just genes, heredity, Anglican schools,” he said. With a meaty sigh, leaning close, he told Monica that he was “your standard divorced man: embittered, impoverished, but still optimistic.”

Monica decided not to tell him that she was a divorced woman.

Most of their exchange would have struck Monica, by day, and in the impartial light of sobriety, as insincere, even dangerous. But, in Sheila’s elegant dining room, amidst tall candles and quivering flames and long-stemmed Venetian glasses and Monica’s heightened sense of herself (she could see her blond image floating diaphanous and lovely, a ghost-beauty in a mirror above Sheila’s antique Spanish sideboard) it all seemed highly significant; intriguing. And it was certainly flattering.

Win was attractive, Monica thought, though rather too self-assured, his smile too nudging, his manner overly familiar. He poured wine into Monica’s glass, he leaned toward her, he brushed, by accident, surely, the back of his hand against her breast; his eyes were nearly lashless though alert, mirthful. How very unlike poor Keith Renwick, Monica thought. (She felt a stab of guilt; and some apprehension. When she telephoned Keith to break off their engagement for the evening—with the most feeble of excuses: Sheila Trask needed help out at Edgemont, her upcoming show, etc.—Keith had replied in short clipped sentences, and had not asked when he might see her again. I’m sorry, Monica told him, feeling, suddenly, truly sorry, but it was too late, perhaps; she had hurt him for the final time; she would not be hearing from him again.)