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a shrug, “For a while, anyway. For as long as it suits both of us.”
    I nodded. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad .”
    “I’d enjoy being out in the country again,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard my emphasis. “Do you think your father would mind if I bought a horse and kept it in his barn? I could ride in the afternoons.”
    “He wouldn’t mind a bit,” I said. “Papa likes you.”
    It was true. Mama Bess regarded Troub with more than a little jealousy and was always wondering, half-aloud and nervously, what others thought when they saw us so much together, and what they said about me behind her back, and what they said about her when they were talking about me. But Papa, who never cared a bean for what anybody thought, found Troub clever and fun loving and admired her tomboy energies.
    “And he’s a horseman,” I added. “I’m sure he would be glad to help you find the perfect horse.” A Morgan, probably. Papa loved Morgan horses.
    Troub nodded. “Tell you what, then. I’ll go home to New Hampshire and visit my father for a few weeks, then I’ll join you at the farm.” She flung both arms around me and kissed me. “Come on, Rose, smile. Another adventure, together.”
    So we packed our bags and boxes. I made arrangements to sublease the Tirana house and cabled Mama Bess that we would book passage as soon as we could. In February, we took Mr. Bunting, the white Maltese terrier we had bought in Budapest the year before, and sailed on the Italian liner Saturnia for New York—a gay sailing, with good weather and lighthearted company. Somewhere off the coast of Spain, I settled down with my journal, making plans for the new year, for the next three years. I was looking forward to the fresh, sunny, open-air life of the farm, a busy life, active, energetic. I would content myself with magazine work, paying work, and free myself from the smoldering discontents about writing something authentic. As I looked out across the fog-veiled Azores, I thought how good it would be to live on an island, and filed it away, another possible dream, in another possible life.
    Disembarking in New York on February 16, we paid an unexpected $4.50 in customs duties for Mr. Bunting, checked into the new and luxurious Berkshire Hotel, and dashed out onto Madison Avenue. Around us, the city was booming. It was splendid and lively and invigorating and above all exciting , reminding me how much I loved the streets and shops and noise and energetic bustle and hurry, loved seeing my agent and stockbroker and editors and, most of all, my friends, all of whom were writers—Mary Margaret McBride and Catharine Brody and Genevieve Parkhurst and Berta Hader. Like starving survivors rescued from a desert island, Troub and I indulged in giddy rounds of restaurants and shopping and the theater and parties and talk-talk-talking about ideas and books and politics and people.
    And I saw Guy Moyston. We sat together in the bus-terminal cafeteria until past one a.m. on a cold February morning, over cups of hot coffee, holding hands across a stained wooden table and saying (but not quite saying it ) a final good-bye. Tall, thin, thinner than he was when I had seen him last, glasses sliding to the end of his nose, he was dear to me, in a way. But not in the way he wanted.
    Guy and I had met in the wild San Francisco days during the Great War. He was an Associated Press correspondent with an inquiring mind and a strong desire to push past the fences. He lent me his publishing-house connections and helped me find publishers for my books about Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin. “You’re off to a swell start, Rose,” he had said. “I’ll be watching to see what you do—and expecting good things. See that you don’t disappoint me.”
    We kept in touch, and in early 1921, both of us were abroad again. I had been to Albania and was in Paris. Guy was posted to the AP’s London bureau, then dispatched to Ireland to cover the Sinn Féin