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She was standing by an open window with a martini in her hand, silent and aloof amid the shrieking hubbub of civilized conversation all around her. Her lips were moving slightly.
    She’s told me often enough that when she saw me pushing through the crowd in her direction she looked for the means of escape but there was none. What she remembered most clearly, she said, was my damp mouth and my pink bow tie. I was apparently nodding my head at her as I eased through the throng, as though to say
You, yes you, it’s you I want.
    —Sidney Klein, I said, when at last I stood before her.
    —You’re English.
    —I’m afraid so.
    So it started. We shook hands. I still can’t explain why I felt such an immediate attraction to this young woman unless it was carnal. But there was an air of angry untouchability about her that interested me considerably, and which I assumed concealed fearful bewilderment and naïvété, it’s often the mask worn by girls new to the city. And there was something else too, a kind of fineness not at once obvious, and although to the casual glance she might appear to be a plain girl, that fineness was a powerful attractor and I just wanted to get physically close to her. I never lost the feeling.
    What she saw in me was less flattering. I am a tall man, perhapsa little on the heavy side, but I dress well. I should also tell you that I am a sentimental man. I feel too much, I always have. It is no accident that I am an authority on Romantic poetry. It was a warm evening. I was in my light seersucker and apparently there were beads of sweat on my forehead. The effect, she said later, was that of an obscure consular official going quietly mad in a far-flung outpost of empire. But there was, too, without question, she said, some force of personality there. She also said I was panting in the heat like a dog.
    I suggested we go somewhere quiet where we could talk. She asked me what I wanted to talk about and I said I wanted to talk about her. Why? Why not? We both knew she was about to leave the party with me. When we were out on the street I proposed a quiet French restaurant in the Village. Then we were in the back of a checker cab and I kissed her and she let me, she wanted me to, she liked me, I was so much older than her, at least forty, she thought, and she felt that with me she’d be safe. I only wish I’d kept her safer. I should have kept her under lock and key.
    When I kissed her I held her cheek and chin in my fingers. Her skin was like a child’s and her lips were soft and cool although they wouldn’t part for me. I felt her body stiffen in involuntary protest at first but I paid no attention to that and after a moment she relaxed, and draped a long thin arm around my neck, and briefly kissed me back, but again without involvement of the tongue. For that I’d have to wait. Then she disengaged herself and stared out the window of the cab.
    At dinner we talked, as I said we would, about her. I figured her to be about twenty-three. But for some reason she sustained the chilly hauteur I’d seen at the party and I soon began to feelshe had no right to it, not having earned it. I persevered, however, still bewitched, or fired up at least with strong emotions loosely rooted in lust. Then as we lingered over our coffee and cigarettes she at last started to open up. I don’t know why. Perhaps she took pity on me. Or perhaps she thought I was harmless. I’d asked her about her childhood, and she told me she’d grown up with her sister, Iris, in a falling-down house in the Hudson Valley complete with a framed verandah and a tower. It had been in her family for generations, she said, but when I asked her how many generations she was vague. Oh, two at least, she said. Daddy grew up there. It stood high on a fissured bluff, and on the south side of the property a steep wooded slope descended to a wetland meadow by the railroad tracks and the river. This was the view she’d had from her bedroom window,