She had a steady beau, Stuart Madison, a very serious and dedicated young diplomat, a friend ever since the old Bar Harbor days when the Madisons and Miltons had been neighbors on the Shore Path, but he was en poste in the Republic of Panama and not due home for a year. Stuart fully intended to stay permanently with the foreign service, which he felt was the highest of careers; it had never even crossed his mind, for example, during the war, that he had any possible obligation to offer his young and healthy body to the armed services. Neither he nor Polly had more than a pittance of inherited money, but she thought she could make up for this in the skills she had learned on Style in cuisine and entertainment. Such things might retain their utility, even in a postwar world. Her own loss of any share in the Milton fortune had done much to change her life and character. Just after her graduation from Vassar her parents had undergone a bitterly litigated divorce caused by her father's infatuation with a young secretary whom he had subsequently married.
