I poured her one, the way she preferred it, neat, like the Bryn Mawr way Diana occupied a chair, knees pressed chastely together. As I handed it to her, she took it out of my fingers and then held my hand, pressing it close to her marble-cool cheek. “You know I don’t mean a word of anything I say, don’t you?”

“Of course. It’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you.”

“Some people fight bulls, ride to hounds, shoot birds. Me, I like to talk. It’s one of the two things I do really well.”

“Darling, you’re the Ladies Grand Champion of talk.”

She swallowed her scotch and bit her thumbnail as if to let me know it was just an appetizer and there were parts of me she would like to try her little bite on. Then she stood up and kissed me, her eyelids flickering as she kept on opening and closing them to see if I was ready to climb aboard the pleasure boat she had chartered for us.

“Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll show you the other thing I do really well?”

I kissed her again, putting my whole self into it, like some ham who’d understudied John Barrymore.

“You go ahead,” I said when, after a while, we came up for air. “I’ll be there shortly. I have a little reading to do first. Some papers the president gave me.”

Her body stiffened in my arms and she seemed about to make another cutting remark. Then she checked herself.

“Don’t get the idea that you can use that excuse more than once,” she said. “I’m as patriotic as the next person. But I’m a woman, too.”

I nodded and kissed her again. “That’s the bit about you I like most of all.”

Diana pushed me away gently and grinned. “All right. Just don’t be too long. And if I’m asleep, see if you can use that giant brain of yours to figure out a way to wake me up.”

“I’ll try to think of something, Princess Aurora.”

I watched her go upstairs. She was worth watching. Her legs seemed designed to sell tickets at the Corcoran. I watched them to the tops of her stockings and then well beyond. For purely philosophical reasons, of course. All philosophers, Nietzsche said, have little understanding of women. But, then, he never watched Diana walk up a flight of stairs. I didn’t know a way of understanding ultimate reality that came close to observing the lacy, veined phenomenon that was Diana’s underwear.