“Got it.” The bead lay in the palm of his hand. It was wrapped in paper, like the others.

“If you’re talented but ugly, you can be who you want to be. You can live like a man if that’s what you want. Take Gertrude Stein, for example.”

“Must I?” He hadn’t the first clue what she was talking about. Perhaps she’d had too much champagne. “She’s that poet who looks like a bulldog, right?”

Now she giggled and reached over to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Quite so, darling. You’re so sensible. My rock-solid husband.” She snuggled in close to him, laying her head on his shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

“Well, you’d need to find someone to keep you in shoes, that’s for sure.”

“Lulu has it all,” she murmured into his shoulder. “Beauty, talent, fame, experience…She’s not much older than me, but I feel like a child in comparison to her. There’s so much she knows.”

The bead in his hand had the one word, tenderness, written on it.

The apartment in the Rue de Lota had been redesigned by Eileen Gray. Genevieve’s idea, though Lulu had more than a hand in it. The renovations took over a year—a year of living at the Ritz at great expense—and went way over budget. The result was a symphony in lacquer. The salon’s shining black walls with silvered geometrical landscape, the study with parchment-covered ceiling and handsome bookcase, the famous canoe-shaped Pirogue sofa in tortoiseshell. The equally famous, artfully curved Bibendum leather seats, the ostrich-egg lampshades…The apartment was photographed for many a style magazine and society page, with the happy couple posing arm in arm in the foreground.

Privately, Robert thought he’d preferred it before. It just wasn’t very homey now. They’d stay a good long time, though, to justify all the money and time that had been lavished on it. In the meantime, he had to run his sewing-machine manufacturing business from the wrong side of the Atlantic, relying more than he wanted to on Bram Fairley and certain other key employees, and on creaky communications systems. The telephones had a tendency to go dead in the middle of an important call, and the electricity seemed to fling itself through the wiring in fits and starts so that you were nervous to do so much as touch anything. All far from ideal, but it was what he wanted because it was what she wanted. Nothing made him more fulfilled than to see his wife happy.

“Are you happy, honey?” They were standing just inside the front door, kissing. His arms were tight around her, and his hands cupped the back of her head, holding it like it was a precious, fragile egg. His pockets were full of glass beads wrapped in paper.