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the threshold, looking at me.
    “Were you able to get hold of your family? Are they reassured?”
    “They weren’t worried.”
    We went back to the living room with the teapot and some more cookies.
    “Do you write, Emma?”
    “Why do you ask? Everybody asks me that!”
    “You’re such a great reader.”
    “I’ve committed some dreadful poems to paper but I will go no further. Reading and writing have nothing to do with each other. Would I ask you if you are going to turn into a woman, just because you like women? Well, your question is just as absurd.”
    “That’s true, but how do you know that I love women?”
    I was silent. Trapped! Once again, in spite of myself, I had allowed my words to take a suggestive turn. Whenever this man stood less than ten feet from me, I could not help but try to charm him.
    “I can just tell,” I whispered, lowering my eyelids.
    “Because I really don’t have a reputation for it,” he added in a low voice. “My brothers and cousins are far more the skirt-chasing type than I am. They reproach me for being well-behaved, far too well-behaved.”
    “Oh, really? Why are you so well-behaved?”
    “No doubt because I’m saving myself for a woman. The right one. The true one.”
    Foolishly, at first I thought that this sentence was addressed to me. When I realized my mistake, my reaction was to try to head off in another direction.
    “You aren’t about to tell me that at your age, you haven’t . . . you still . . .”
    I did not finish my sentence, so dismayed was I with myself. Here I was, grilling an unbearably handsome man whom I had dressed up as a woman, to try to find out whether he was a virgin!
    His jaw dropped, between stupefaction and amusement.
    “No, to ease your mind . . . I have . . . had that experience. And a great pleasure it is, too. You must realize, in my circle there were many women older than myself, still superb, who delighted in initiating me at a fairly young age.”
    “You have reassured me,” I sighed, as if he were talking about his prowess at golf.
    “I do however prefer a good hike in nature, or a long ride, or swimming for several hours like this morning. I’ve prioritized my pleasures.”
    “I’m the same,” I lied.
    I used the excuse of a log that was about to go out to rush over to the fireplace.
    “Why are you telling me this?” I grumbled haughtily.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Why are you talking to me about such personal things when we don’t even know each other?”
    He turned away, took time to think, then focused his eyes upon me, gravely.
    “It seems obvious to me . . .”
    “Not to me.”
    “We fancy each other, do we not?”
    It was my turn to look away, to pretend to be thinking before training my gaze on him.
    “Yes, you’re right: it’s obvious.”
    I think that at that moment—and for all the years that remained—the air around us changed for good.
    The doorbell disturbed this harmony with its shrill ring. He winced: “My chauffeur . . .”
    “Already?”
    Life holds so many surprises in store: at noon I did not know this man, at twilight the idea of parting from him seemed intolerable.
    “No, Guillaume, you can’t leave like this.”
    “In a robe?”
    “In a robe or in anything, you can’t leave.”
    “I’ll come back.”
    “Promise?”
    “I swear.”
    He kissed my hand for an instant that was as rich as all my twenty-three years gone by.
    As he was going out the door, I added, “I’m counting on you to find me again, because I don’t even know who you are.”
    He screwed up his eyes.
    “That’s what is so marvelous: you didn’t recognize me.”
    Then he closed the door.
    I did not want to watch as he left; I was devastated, and stayed at the back of the dark hallway.
    In a state of shock, I paid no attention to his last sentence; at night, however, as I went back over—more than once—every moment of our encounter, I wondered about these words: “You didn’t recognize me.” Had I already