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By Root 709 0

suit with black braid piping and frog closures. The suit, though somewhat out of date, squares her shoulders and flatters her waist. With the suit, she wears a high-necked ivory silk blouse that once belonged to her mother and was left behind in her closets. Olympia chooses pearls for her jewelry: drop earrings, a rope at her neck, and a bracelet. She fusses for nearly an hour with her hair, forming wide wings at the sides and a double bun at the back. When she is dressed, she studies herself in the glass in the kitchen and is somewhat surprised to see that her face looks considerably older than she has remembered it, its planes more accentuated. Her figure is thinner as well, somehow longer, or perhaps this is just an illusion created by the suit. No, she is definitely thinner. She seems foreign to herself and yet oddly familiar, familiar from a time when it was not unusual to dress in velvet and pearls or to spend an hour on one’s hair.

Payson Tucker comes for Olympia at precisely six o’clock, as he said he would, in a smart lemon and black motorcar. His white shirt shines in the headlamps as he passes in front of the automobile after helping her in. He seems larger, more adroit than she has remembered him. Since it is only Olympia’s second time in a motorcar (though she does not tell Tucker this), she is more than a little tremulous when they begin to move faster than seems prudent along the winding narrow lane that abuts the seawall and the summer cottages of Fortune’s Rocks.

“You must be one of the few people still in residence on the beach,” he says.

“I think I may be.”

“You do not mind being so isolated?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “In fact, I am rather afraid I am enjoying it.”

At the hotel, a valet takes the car from Tucker, who touches Olympia’s elbow gently as he guides her up the long set of stairs. Although she has prepared herself, she hesitates a bit when they enter the lobby, a misstep she tries to hide with conversation.

“What brings you to the Highland so late in the season?” she asks Tucker.

“I have business in Fortune’s Rocks both today and tomorrow,” he answers, moving her firmly through the lobby, “and it seemed pointless to make the journey back and forth to Exeter, which is where I live. And besides, it has given me an excellent opportunity to see you again.”

He leads her into the dining room, which seems not to have changed at all. There are, she notes, only a few diners on this Tuesday in October. Olympia and Tucker are led to a table with white candles and late-summer roses, and as she sits, she takes in the sparkling goblets, the silver champagne buckets, the heavy cutlery, the massive crystal chandelier at the dining room’s center, and then the menu (haricot mutton, turkey with oyster sauce, mock turtle soup, apple brown Betty), reflecting that it has been four years since she was last in society. And she further reflects how very much, when she was, she took for granted its luxury, its furnishings, its food, its accoutrements, as if they were her birthright, her due, with hardly a thought — barely even an imagining — of those who would never have such luxury offered to them. Perhaps obliviousness is necessary, she thinks, to enjoy, or even to bear, this excess.

“The hotel will be open only a week longer,” says Tucker.

“It seems there are not many in residence. You shall be rattling around.”

“If I may say so — and I hope you will not be offended by this — you look very lovely tonight,” Tucker says. He takes off his spectacles and puts them on the table beside his plate. She is startled to see, without the buffer of the gold-rimmed eyeglasses, how intensely black his eyes are, how long and silky his lashes.

“If I am offended by such a pronouncement,” Olympia says, “I do not know how we shall proceed with my case. As I recall, we spoke of rather more disturbing matters during our first meeting at your office.”

Tucker’s hair, worn straight back from his forehead tonight, is shiny with hair wax or with oil. This must be a new fashion as well, Olympia thinks, and she is certain that her