By the time Alex and Juliet returned from the dinner party – they found their babysitters watching television innocently, side by side on the sofa – Alex was in a better mood. He joked with them while Juliet searched in her purse for the money to pay them. He asked if they were still reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Had they given up on decadence yet? Lydia turned on all her charm and chattered eagerly, punctuating her remarks with false-sounding bursts of laughter. — Oh no, she said. — We’re going to be decadent for years!

But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed amused delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence, so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.