Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

After Henry's treatment of her she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

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.

Good girls hold their heads high by daylight, Their grace and their virtue soaring with kites, While bad girls slink along in their shame- Everyone stares at them, everyone blames. But those bad girls sleep soundly at night, Ne'er do their consciences wake them in a fright, While our good girls toss and they turn- They lay awake for those who will burn.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.

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.