It might’ve been because she just kept sitting there, not moving, just looking at the dashboard because the windshield had now been completely fogged over by their breath. But, whatever it was, Edward finally remembered his manners and jumped out of the car and ran around to her side to escort her out and up the steps to her front door. Finally, she thought.

Vivian was ready to be worshipped. Like Douglas Fairbanks did Mary Pickford, or King Edward did Wallis Simpson. She’d seen the two of them in one of the magazines she liked to buy after she collected her wages from Bell. It was probably Life, because that was the one that mentioned international things, and if she were being honest she’d tell you she wouldn’t have been too interested except the tabloid photographs of one Mrs. Wallis Simpson with King Edward VIII of England on a yacht were scandalous and Vivian couldn’t resist a good scandal. The word “illicit” was dropped a number of times throughout the article, and Vivian declared to her younger sister, Violet, that Mrs. Simpson was nothing better than a home-wrecking whore.

“Mrs. Simpson,” she hissed, pointing at the words on the page. “She’s already married! She’s wrecking her own home, for chrissakes.”

“Vivy!” Violet was shocked by Vivian’s language, but also secretly impressed. “Do all the switchboard girls talk like that?”

Vivian had shrugged. She and Violet followed the story of Edward and Wallis and when the King of England stepped away from his title and his crown in order to marry Mrs. Simpson, boy, oh, boy, did Vivian change her tune. All that illicit whorish home wrecking was forgotten the moment Mrs. Simpson divorced her husband and accepted Edward’s marriage proposal.

Vivian found herself in a deep swoon over the romance of it all. A king who’d give up his kingdom for the woman he loved! It made Vivian dizzy, flushed and tingly in the places a decent girl didn’t talk about. Oh, sure, there were a couple of boys in Wooster who came close to that kind of adoring devotion, because Vivian McGinty was a lively girl, and kept her lipstick fresh and her seams straight. She was “hotsy-totsy,” as they said, and had more than her fair share of attention from the opposite sex, which went a little ways toward filling some of those Swiss cheese holes. But it was Edward Dalton’s invitation to go out driving that came on the same day as the tabloid reports of the Wallis and Edward engagement. In her dreamy, dizzy frame of mind, Vivian had quickly accepted. It was as if the stars had aligned to create that perfect romantic afternoon drive down bumpy Henrietta Street in Edward’s crummy Model A Deluxe Roadster. The Model A was a jalopy all right, but it might’ve been the closest thing Wooster had to a yacht, as far as Vivian was concerned.