Robert had no particular objection to a spell in Paris. It was cheap, for one thing. Postwar, the franc was practically worthless against the dollar, and, consequently, the city was full of Americans. Home away from home. And then, he had a fondness for Old Europe. He’d come to the continent in 1918, when he drove ambulances at the Italian front during the Austrian offensive at Piave, and fell in love, for the first time, with an English nurse called Agnes, who had a face like an angel and an air of gentle, exquisite sadness. The sadness concerned a fiancé who’d gone missing in action. Robert made it his personal mission to cheer the girl up and show her that there could be life beyond Edward. Gradually the color returned to Agnes’s cheeks and her laughter came much more freely. He intended, when the war was over, to ask her to marry him. But just before he was able to pop the question, she received a momentous letter. Edward was alive. He’d spent most of the year in a German prison camp, and was now a free man again. He declared himself “not quite the ticket” but eager to “pick up where we left off, dearest.”

Agnes could hardly get the words out. When Robert asked her what she planned to do, she simply hung her head and allowed her tears to roll down her nose. It was only later, too late, that Robert wondered if she had in fact, been waiting for him to say something—do something. Declare his love once and for all and reassure her that yes, there still was a life beyond Edward. He didn’t, of course. His sense of honor and duty forbade it. And that was the last time he ever saw her.