Anna Godbersen

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself__or she had known what Henry__ love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands.

He was a mystery to her, and every time she tried to solve him it caused her a little more pain. But when she tired to give him up he pursued her in her thoughts, stronger each time.

Don't go looking for boys in the darkThey will say pretty things thenleave you with scars.Do go looking for boys in the parkFor that is where the true gentlemen are.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn't know what she has. That's the heart of it. She's like some wild creature who hasn't a clue the worth of its coat.

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today__ou have simply set the standard too high,' he said.

She felt so much aware of her own beauty it seemed inconceivable that everybody else wouldn't notice the difference too.

Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.

He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams.The girls of 1929.

Interesting" people were her favorite hobby. She collected them: the type who did gay things late at night and smoked cigarettes in mixed company, those would have most scandalized her own mother.

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.

How she wished she had Elizabeth to herself for a little so they could discuss what Henry's real intentions were and also how high and mighty Penelope had acted at lunch and what a tremendous insult it was that she'd come at all and did anyone really think she was beautiful with those oversize features anyway.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.