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Sedley.” Just saying what he thought was her name (it wasn’t) gave him pleasure. “Where were you going to go when you got off the island?” He drew back a little and surveyed her—a lovely task—as if trying to solve a riddle. “You’re flushed with sun. You were on the beach.” She seemed pleased by his desire to work through this. “You weren’t waiting for a boat, were you?” She brightened, impressed by his sharpness. “The boat would have to be either very small or large enough to launch another boat to pick you up.”
    “A hundred and five feet,” was her response.
    “That’s the length of a corvette. Was it? Canada has been decommissioning them, and people are making them into yachts.”
    “No, it was built in nineteen twenty-eight for the America’s Cup.”
    “But it didn’t show.”
    “It didn’t win the Cup, either. It travels with the wind, and the wind is unreliable. I waited my appointed hours, and then I left.”
    “Today,” he said, “the wind moved as steadily as a conveyor belt.”
    “Perhaps yesterday the wind was not so steady, or the boat lost a mast. Things like that happen on the sea all the time. Meanwhile, I’m unexpectedly on my way home.”
    “You have no luggage. The boat is yours?”
    “Hardly.”
    “But you have things on board.”
    “A whole set. In my own cabin.”
    “I did notice,” he said, “that you carry nothing. Not a purse, a bag, an umbrella, or a ring on your finger. No jewelry at all.”
    “No jewelry,” she repeated.
    “The effect is beautiful,” he told her, touching the line but not crossing it—for it had been moved.
    “Are you one of those people,” she asked, “who think everything is beautiful?”
    “No. That would mean that nothing is beautiful, or that I would have an eye like God’s. And then, more simply, everything is not beautiful.”
    “What about that?” she asked, indicating the cliffs of lower Manhattan three-quarters ahead, shining in the western sun. “It’s commonly perceived as beautiful. People say that it is, and take pictures with their Brownies. What do you think?”
    “I think,” he said, anticipating the point and going beyond it before he would answer her question, “that one of the finest things in the world, a saintly and holy thing, is when someone sees the beauty in something, but especially in some
one,
who is commonly taken as having no beauty at all. I once knew a woman who in the instant she understood that she was loved and that her beauty was perceived, hardly survived the intensity of her emotions. She was shaking in disbelief—one side of her face had been forever disfigured—because it was as if in that moment God were there. This was in Germany, in the Black Forest, just like a fairy tale, but it was true. My friend, who was with me and who fell in love with her, loves her to this day. He married her. They live in New Jersey.”
    Catherine was disturbed because she knew her life was going off course, and she didn’t like things to go off course. He went on to finish what he was saying and move to a lighter note, not wanting to diminish in any way the feeling almost of weightlessness that he had had since he had first seen her.
    “I do believe, then, in that sense, that there’s beauty in everything other than in evil, but that it would take a perfect and perfectly compassionate being to see it.”
    “And what about Manhattan?” she asked, not as the test she had originally intended, for he had already passed that, but to bring him back. She, too, did not want to compromise what she was feeling.
    “Don’t like it.”
    “How come? Everyone else does.”
    “It’s square, rectilinear, blocky. These buildings with their hard, unbroken planes are like lives in which nothing happens. Modern architects apparently haven’t heard of either nature or human nature.”
    “You don’t like modern architecture?”
    “No, but don’t worry about the architects. They’ll always be prosperous