Today she wore a dark green suit and a Philip Treacy hat that was a minuscule square of black velvet topped with a few wisps of what might be spun sugar.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look ghastly.”

“It’s this place.”

She looked about the office, frowning. It was she who had suggested he borrow the room-her father owned the building. “What’s wrong with it?”

He did not want to admit his fright at being almost forty floors above street level. “It’s too impersonal. I don’t know if I can write here.”

“You could work at the apartment.”

“You know I can’t write at home.”

She settled on him her gray-green gaze. “ Is it home?” The silence that followed this was a chasm into which they both cast a glance and then stepped quickly back.

“You could go out to Silver Barn.” Silver Barn was their-her-house on Long Island. “The study is all set up. It’s quiet, no one to disturb you.” He pulled a face. “Well then,” she said, with a tightening of the lips, “if you can’t work, you can take me to lunch.”

They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absentmindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.

Mario’s was crowded, as usual these days. The red-check tablecloths and rickety bentwood chairs proclaimed a peasant plainness that was contradicted by the breathtaking prices on the menu. The Glasses had been coming here since the early days of the establishment, long before they had moved permanently to New York, when Mario himself was still in charge and the place really was plain.