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So they embarked on a friendship, nothing more. Julia was out of the running. “I have never liked the idea—which is so appealing to many men—of Man the Sculptor, moulding and shaping a woman to his desire,” Paul explained to his brother, never imagining that love itself might be a sculptor pretty handy with clay. He and Julia went to movies, traveled a bit in Ceylon, and when she was transferred to China shortly after he was, they did some sightseeing there as well. They shared many meals; they talked and talked. And often they talked about food. Paul had spent years in Paris and was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic food lover. Julia liked these conversations—she certainly liked them better than the ones about general semantics—but as far as she was concerned, the most delicious thing about the meals they shared was Paul. Nonetheless, her sharp intellect rooted around happily in the talk about flavors, recipes, and culinary cultures that flowed between herself and this entrancing man. Paul was quickly persuaded that he had met a fellow epicure. “She is a gourmet and likes to cook and talk about food,” he reported admiringly, a few months after meeting her. He also knew a great deal about music, which she found less of a stretch, since she had minored in the subject at Smith. (“She is devoted to music,” Paul told Charlie approvingly.) Her shortcomings were, of course, severe in his eyes. But he came to treasure the qualities she brought to a friendship—constancy, humor, resilience, character. About six months after they met: “Julia is a nice person, a warm and witty girl.” Several months later: “A darling warm lovely girl.” A year after they met: “Julie…is a great solace.” And at last, in August 1945, a sonnet for her birthday. This was only three months after he had written the poem beginning “These prison-wires strung round my bones,” with its despairing imagery of the wasteland and the lonely sea. Now he was in full Shakespearean mode, and it was Julia’s doing.

How like the Autumn’s warmth is Julia’s face

So filled with Nature’s bounty, Nature’s worth.

And how like summer’s heat is her embrace

Wherein at last she melts my frozen earth.

Endowed, the awakened fields abound

With newly green effulgence, smiling flowers.

Then all the lovely riches of the ground

Spring up, responsive to her magic powers.

Sweet friendship, like the harvest-cycle, moves

From scattered seed to final ripened grain,

Which, glowing in the warmth of Autumn, proves

The richness of the soil, and mankind’s gain.

I cast this heaped abundance at your feet

An offering to Summer, and her heat.

Still, they weren’t quite engaged when the war ended. For all the delights of this relationship, they both worried that perhaps it was just a wartime fling. Maybe what Julia called their “friendly passion,” which was rooted in their great enjoyment of each other’s company, wasn’t powerful enough to see them through to marriage and beyond. Julia was painfully aware of how different she was from Paul’s great love, Edith Kennedy, who had been chic, intellectual, and—Paul’s favorite term of approval—“worldly.” Years later, when they were married and living in Paris, she could go to a Christian Dior fashion show and admire the “slightly ravaged ‘worldly’ look” of the models, admitting it was a look far beyond her power to achieve. (“Great big milk-fed ‘femme de menage,’ that’s me.”) But now she just had to hope it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. As they parted in China with plans to meet each other’s family and test the relationship by the light of real life, neither one knew quite what would come next. Julia went back to Pasadena, and Paul returned to Washington and the State Department. They spent the first six months of 1946 on opposite coasts, writing letters and pondering the future. And, as it turned out, missing each other terribly. If this was “friendly passion,” the emphasis was beginning to fall equally on both terms. “I am in a warm love-lust mood, wanting to have my ear-rings