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don’t think anyone can guess, about Kurt?” Betsy asked.
    A debutante is an upper-class daughter trying out for a career as an upper-class wife. She might have a settlement, which means adowry like a Jane Austen heroine, and in fact Betsy did, though she was by no means an heiress. While married people are allowed to be as promiscuous as they like as long as they don’t make a scandal, virginity is supposed to be a debutante’s most prized possession, absolutely the most significant thing she has to bring to a marriage. This is only for the girls. Men can have as much experience as they want, of course. The hypocrisy is shocking. “Nobody can tell,” I said, as reassuringly as I could, though of course I didn’t know any more about it than she did—less. “Try to pretend none of it ever happened. Nobody knows except you and me, and Leni, but she’d never tell because it would destroy her own reputation. Nobody need ever know.”
    Betsy grimaced and nodded. Then she took a deep breath and changed the subject. “I don’t suppose Sir Alan will take us out for drinks,” she said, getting up and drifting towards the door. “No chaperone. And he’s my father’s friend, so he’s probably frightfully proper.”
    “We chaperone each other, don’t we? And he doesn’t seem all that proper to me, not with that beard. He must be a bit of a pirate, surely?” I looked at the dresses strewn on my bed and decided to leave them for Olive to hang up.
    “Mummy says his mother says he has a skin condition which makes him get pimples when he shaves,” Betsy said. “Doesn’t sound very piratical to me.”
    We both laughed. “Come and do me up when you’re ready,” she said.
    I took my watch off the bedside table and looked at it. “I’ll come now. He’ll be here any minute.” The watch was slim, golden, and Swiss. I fastened it around my wrist. Uncle Carmichael had given me the money to buy it, and then more money when I told him it needed mending, when we’d needed money for Betsy’s operation.
    I helped Betsy dress. She gave me her string of pearls, which Islipped into my bag, while she put her chain into her skirt pocket. We both pulled on our sweaters and did our hair and our faces in Betsy’s room, where the mirror wasn’t so flyspecked as the one in my room. We were lingering over our makeup when Nanny came to say that Sir Alan was here and waiting for us. We snatched up our handbags and went down.
    “Miss Maynard,” he said, very correctly, as Betsy preceded me into the drawing room.
    “Sir Alan,” she replied, shaking his hand without undue cordiality.
    Then he turned to me. I couldn’t help noticing again that his eyes were at precisely my own level. “Miss Royston—but I will always think of you as Cinderella.”
    “It was a pair of shoes, not a slipper,” I said, disconcerted.
    “Don’t keep them out too late,” Mrs. Maynard urged.
    “All mothers have said that to young men since we were living in caves,” Mr. Maynard added, smiling.
    It didn’t surprise me that Sir Alan had his own car; it did surprise me that it was a sleek new Skoda Madame, in cherry red. “This is my new toy,” he said, opening the back door for me. “Fruits of the peace. Two years ago they were building nothing but tanks. Now the Russians are flattened, they can turn their attention to gentler things. I had a boring old Bentley until the first of these were imported.”
    He drove us smoothly through the streets of London, talking to Betsy about cars. He parked neatly in a side street near Cavendish Square. “I have a friend with a flat here with rather a good view onto Wigmore Street,” he said, escorting us out of the car and down the street. “We’ll be able to see the procession coming down Portland Place, coming round the corner, and then passing right in front of us and going down Wigmore Street, and all without being crushed in the crowd. Then we can come out, hop into the car, and drivedown to Marble