"Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry abou… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.

Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.