Opaline meets writers like Hemingway, Joyce, and Fitzgerald. In addition, she begins a love affair with Armand. One day while she’s working in the bookshop, a journalist writing about Hemingway takes a photograph of Hemingway with Sylvia and Opaline in the background. She fears that it will alert Lyndon of her whereabouts but pushes it from her mind, concluding that he would never read such an article.

Another day, Opaline decides to surprise Armand with a visit but finds him at a cafe with another woman. He claims that he has had other affairs but realized he loved Opaline and was ending things with the other woman. Charmed despite herself, she returns with him to his apartment for the night. When she returns to her apartment, she sees her brother’s walking cane by the door.

In the contemporary storyline, Madame Bowden holds a dinner party for old friends. Martha performs her duties mechanically, when she suddenly realizes that Madame Bowden herself isn’t at the dinner table. She asks the other ladies if Madame Bowden will be back for dessert, and they laugh at her and call her a country girl who obviously knows her place. Martha goes to her basement apartment, feeling lonely and depressed.