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

Henry closed his eyes and imagined the sweet petulant woundedness with which she had stared at him on the beach. He felt a little proud that she could love him.

The headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.

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.

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