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me to. But she told me she preferred to live the novel she would otherwise have written.”
    â€œWhich is just what she did, damn her! Leaving not a page for a survivor to read. She took everything with her. Yet I have to admit there was a magnificence in her very selfishness. She didn’t really need either of her husbands, and certainly not any of her children. They, poor things, needed people. Oh, she saw that. She thought I could make do with Larkin. Maybe she was right. What do you think?”
    â€œGracious me, Cora. What a question! Could you love the man?”
    â€œI certainly don’t love him now. Is that necessary?”
    â€œWell, it certainly helps. I don’t say that love is always strictly necessary, but the woman who doesn’t feel it is undertaking a big job when she offers to make a man happy.”
    â€œMake
him
happy? But I want him to make
me
happy!”
    â€œMy dear girl, you’re joking of course.”
    â€œOh, Hubert, can’t you stop being Thackeray for a minute? I’m deadly serious. I’m consulting you about what to do with my life!”
    My thoughts became grave indeed at this. “Then don’t misunderstand me, Cora. I’m being equally serious. If you marry this man with no other object than to use his wealth to solve your personal problems, you will be doing a wicked thing.”
    â€œOh, Hubert, wicked. Wake up. This is the twentieth century we’re in.”
    â€œI needn’t choose to be in it. Wicked is a fine old term to remember. There’s something virile in it, as opposed to lame excuses like
compulsive
or
obsessive
or
driven.
”
    â€œAnd you think I’d be wicked to marry Ralph?”
    â€œUnless you were prepared—sincerely prepared—to do your best to make his life a happy one.”
    â€œYou really mean that?”
    â€œI do. My dear Cora, when your very soul is at stake, I don’t beat around the bush.”
    â€œYou think when I die, I’d go to hell?”
    â€œI don’t believe in hell. Except to the extent that it exists in this life for those who have risked it. Don’t be one of them. Don’t do this to any man. You’ll live to regret it as much as he will.”
    â€œOh, I think you’ll find that Ralph can look out for himself.”
    â€œHe’s not my concern, Cora. You are.”
    â€œPerhaps I’d better relieve you of that. I can’t bring myself to accept your credo, Hubert.”
3
    For Letty Bernard, the trio on my Saturday mornings was an oasis, not exactly in a desert, but in a life that reached few things in the center of her heart. It was true that she was the only child of rich and indulgent parents; that she lived in a Beaux Arts mansion glittering with the objects that her father had captured from the Italian Renaissance; that she had a keen eye for arts and letters, but it was also true that she was endowed, or perhaps hampered, with a vision that took in her environment without the least illusion. Pale, square-faced, with straight dark hair and a strong stocky figure, Letty knew exactly what were her assets and what were her liabilities.
    She knew, for example, that her slender allowance of feminine charm was only in part balanced by her wealth, that she was both fortunate and unfortunate to have been admitted to Miss Dickerman’s Classes only through that elite young ladies’ academy’s strictly limited quota for Jewish students, that her mother was an amiable fool and that her father, overcome by her beauty, had married her, even knowing that it had taken his fortune to appease her Episcopalian family’s anti-Semitism. And she also knew that her beloved male parent was a cool, calculating man, always ready to listen to a compromise.
    Yet Elias Bernard occupied most of the available area of his daughter’s carefully guarded heart, as she suspected that she did his. They were full partners, however