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.

So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.

She had had no idea what it would do to her seeing him in a suit.

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

Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.

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.

Her heart the damned thing had begun to race and she only hoped that the rapid inflation and deflation of her chest wasn't visible beneath her fitted bodice.