She wore her thick, rough hair cut short, almost like a boy’s; her body was lithe, with a hint of later fullness. Her legs were rounded, but athletically firm, and Benjamin, who had been spoiled a little by the ease with which he had drifted into one affair after another with some of the prettiest women in New York, was surprised to find that he thought, in all sobriety, that Peggy’s legs, with their healthy sensuality, were the most charming legs he had ever seen on a girl. At twenty, Peggy was startlingly pretty; by the age of thirty she would be beautiful.Benjamin met her on a tennis court in the garden of some friends of his parents, a middle-aged couple by the name of Bronstein, who had moved south from New York and who ran a prosperous men’s clothing store in town and who invited him to their house every time he was released for a few hours from camp.Peggy’s parents had rented the house next to the Bronstein’s. The first time Benjamin saw Peggy was when she came through a gate in the hedge that divided the two properties.
