So it seemed Michard may have been right . . . she was someone beyond his grasp. An irony there: having established himself as a friend in order to destroy her lover, it seemed he would always remain a friend, just a friend.

He saw her intermittently through what was left of that December, generally in the company of men he did not know, men he did not want to know. Once, after a performance at the home of some shipping magnate, he even saw her on the arm of another military officer, a major of good family, obvious means.

Then on a Thursday he met her for dinner on the rue de Lille. She arrived late, still a little breathless from an earlier appointment with the impresario Gabriel Astruc. She talked about her upcoming performance in Madrid and a tentative appearance with the Ballet Russe in Monte Carlo. She talked to her friend about her men . . . Jules Cambon of the French Foreign Office, Giacomo Puccini, Jules Massenet, some nameless count, some probably fictional prince. Friend Nicky had to sit there and hear it all. Had to. Couldn't help it.

It was a Friday when things came to a head, a supposedly educational afternoon in the Louvre. She had asked him to "reveal" the moderns to her, presumably so that she could discuss them in polite society. He met her in a hired cab that he could not afford and spent more than seven hours dragging her through the galleries.

To her credit she tended to like the better stuff: Renoir's lillies, Monet's laurels, Seurat's poplars in translucent light. True, Goya left her a little cold, but she must have seen something in van Gogh because afterward she was unusually pensive.

They dined on chilled salmon and asparagus. An earlier rain had left the air invigorating, so they walked from the restaurant to her apartment. It was still early, a prolonged winter's evening ... he casually invited himself upstairs.

Since his last visit she had filled her sittingroom with things he had never seen before: oriental masks, frayed tapestries, a hideous bronze Buddha. The photographs of Michard, however, were gone.

She offered him a cup of cocoa, but he asked for cognac. She slipped off her shawl, he laid his coat across the arm of the chair. After a moment of silence he wandered to the far wall and a curious sketch of a dancer at the feet of an Arab.

"You?"

She brushed aside a wisp of stray hair. "Yes, that's me. But I didn't actually pose like that. He made it up."

"Who's the artist?"

"A friend. Don't you like it?"

"No, not much."

He crossed the room, sweeping back the drapes: black clouds in an indigo sky, long vistas of rose trees in the headlights of passing automobiles.

"Did I tell you that they may want me to appear in Vienna next year?"

There was a lamp on the table, a black spider of a thing. He switched it off. "Vienna?"