It was going to be a surprise for Charlie. She had invited the Tullets and the Carrolls, their very best friends; and Anna was going to cook chicken terrazzini, Charlie’s favorite dish. After she had finished going over the list with Anna, in the kitchen, she got up from the table and stood facing the window, looking out at the snow-splotched lawn, trying to think if there were anything she had forgotten. She was ten years younger than Charlie, and she looked ten years younger than she was — a thin, slender woman with black hair cut in the short-cropped Italian style, and a good, soft profile. She had large, dark flashing eyes, and a mouth with lips she thought were too small. As a type she was tweeds, tapered slacks, skirts and sweaters, station wagons and shaggy-looking poodles — but with a flair, always; a very feminine flair. She belonged in Greenwich. And in the summers when Charlie and she roughed it out at their cottage in Fair Harbor, on Fire Island, she belonged there. Those years during which she and Charlie lived on Central Park West were the only ones she had ever spent as a city-dweller; and she had hated it.
