It was as simple as that. To Sari, she had pretended to make light of the whole thing, pretended it wasn’t important, pretended she was merely going through the motions of it all to please her parents. But she had wanted it. She had wanted the Cotillion and the Bachelors’ Ball. She had wanted the attention, and her photograph in the papers, and she had wanted the escorts and the filling out of dance cards and the parties—the dances and the luncheons and the teas and the balls that would go on throughout all that 1926–1927 season. She had wanted every little bit of it. By the spring of 1926 she had ordered—from Tiffany’s in New York!—the special, engraved, white-on-blue stationery which was for answering invitations and writing thank-you notes. By July, she had received her special engagement calendar, bound in blue leather, with the words embossed in gold on the cover, “My Season—Joanna LeBaron.” The engagement book had come from Tiffany’s also. (“So much more posh, don’t you think, than something from Shreve’s?”
