The sun was rising, spreading golden light across the rich mahogany top of the piano. On it stood a vase that was probably an ancient Greek original. Sarah was quietly filling it with flowers from a garden that could be seen beyond the windows, just beginning to glow with the light of morning.

Miriam opened the piano. She toyed with the keys for a moment, then riffled in the score. “Sarah,” she said, “would you?”

Sarah sat down at the piano. Suddenly she looked up at Paul. She held out her hands. “These belong to a surgeon,” she said.

What was she getting at?

She trilled up and down the scales, shaking her head in the shafts of sunlight, so that her locks shot red-brown sparks.

Miriam set the score before her, and Sarah began to play, and quite well. It took Paul a moment to recognize “Caro Nome,” and then Miriam was singing it, one of the greatest homages to the female soul that had ever been written. That she was singing it directly from the hand of its author made the experience all the more haunting.

Leo came in and listened, wiping her hands on her apron and blowing a curl out of her eyes.

When the song came to an end, Paul wanted to hold Miriam, to let her know again how he felt. They had just had profound sex together, and he was in profound love. It sounded stupid, he knew that, and he couldn’t actually say it. He’d only known her for a few hours, for the love of Christ.

She threw back her head and sang at the top of her lungs, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy!” She danced him round and round the room.

At noon she was still showing him her collections, her poetry—she had the original folio manuscript of John Keats’s “Lamia,” and Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” among many other wonders.

Paul struggled to show interest, but he had been asleep in the chair where he sat for at least a full minute when she shook his shoulder.

“Come on,” she whispered in his ear, “you need a cuddle.”

She took him upstairs, then, and they stripped in the sumptuous bedroom. She dropped her clothes to the floor for Leo to run around picking up. He was afraid to do the same, and put his on the edge of a little daybed.

Sarah drew them a bath in a huge onyx tub that must have, in itself, cost a million dollars. In fact, it was the damnedest tub he’d ever seen—beautiful, glowing stone embedded with gold nymphs and satyrs and sea creatures.