Along time ago, when I was very young and thin and blond and broke—poor, actually—I had a disastrous love affair with a married diplomat, a consul, from a Fascist country. And, thinking back, I am not sure which aspect of this description gives me the most remorse: his marriage or his politics. His wife, was, of course, allowed to hear all about it and eventually suffered some sort of breakdown, also, his oil-rich country has got much worse—more Fascist.

In those days I had three small children, girls, a little alimony and child support, and a demanding, senseless job in a nursery school, which paid for the girls' tuition; it did not occur to me that a better job would have done the same, with possibly some left over. Besides, in a general way I don't much like children, and I was always catching their colds.

My affair with Henry did not improve my life (having gone to school in England, he had become a passionate Anglophile, and had anglicized his Middle Eastern name)—although while it lasted I felt myself irradiated, even enobled with the grandeur of our passion. And I really believed that we would divorce his wife, as he said he would, and that we would return to his country and together would work for the underground.

We met at a large party to which I had gone in a borrowed black chiffon dress—a dress doubly deceptive: first, in not being mine, and second, in being so bare that I did not know what to wear under it and so wore nothing, a thing not generally done at that time, and no doubt making me look both more provocative and more available than in fact I was.