Then two things happened. They should have cancelled each other out, but they did not. He found himself suspecting that Esther Costello was a fake. Not just a racket, but a straightforward fake. And he found that he was falling in love with her.

The two things happened side by side: sometimes it was difficult to tell when he was watching Esther with suspicion, and when with love … Love gave him wonder and desire; suspicion gave him three separate items which finally sent him racing home to Boston, ahead of the party, with the hottest news story of the decade.

The first item that pricked his attention was so slight that only afterwards, when he was reviewing his monstrous suspicions, did it make its true weight felt. He had been sitting in the lounge of their hotel suite in New York, with Charles Bannister in the opposite armchair. The time was after lunch, which meant that Bannister was far from sober; the two of them had been talking idly, about the big meeting which was scheduled for a few days ahead, when Esther came into the room. She looked young and cool in her print dress, and not for the first time Harry Grant found himself appraising her as a woman, instead of a protected human being outside the normal tide of desire. To examine her thus was very agreeable.

When she sat down, smoothing her dress, he winked at Charles Bannister, and said: “She really is a honey, isn’t she? Just look at that figure!”

Grant would never have said this, if he had not been slightly drunk himself, and surprised by his sudden feeling of attraction for Esther. But the girl really did look beautiful, on that summer afternoon; her face was studious and beautifully formed, her body graceful, her legs a delight …

It seemed to Grant an enormous pity that he could not tell her so himself.

He was very much taken aback to hear Charles Bannister say, in tones of the utmost discomfort: “You oughtn’t to talk like that about her!”

As well as surprising him, it angered Grant to be thus rebuked by this second-rate, drunken hanger-on, and he countered roughly: “What the hell? She can’t hear, can she?” The girl, sitting immobile across the room from him, had the grace and the inaccessibility of a marble statue; her useless beauty reproached him, and he was driven beyond what he would normally have said, to Charles Bannister or to anyone else. “What does it matter what I say? I wish she could hear. I’d like to tell her she’s got the best-looking body in New York!”

“That’ll do, Grant!” There was a drunken embarrassment in Charles Bannister’s voice that again took him aback. “Just shut up about her, will you?”

“What’s your worry?” Grant felt like taunting him now. “Not getting jealous, are you?” He looked again at Esther, at her oval face and composed brow. He thought again: I wish she could hear – I’d tell her a thing or two … “If this is what they mean by a blind date,” he said, with appalling crudity, “I’d choose it every time.”