Till We Meet Again by Judith Krantz

what would happen if they found out where she was.
    “Read this, Marie-France,” Doctor Coudert said grimly. “And tell me what you think.”
    “You could always hire detectives,” the Baronne said after she had read the few lines, “but I doubt that they’d be able to trace her. There’s nothing to go on, no leads. Paris is so vast.”
    “Precisely what I thought. I’ll hire them anyway, but I don’t have much hope.”
    “What are we going to do?” Chantal Coudert cried in despair.
    “If Eve hasn’t returned by the end of another week, I can’t keep on pretending that she has the mumps. They don’t last forever. Marie-France must stay here until it’s time for Eve to feel better, and then she will persuade us to let her take her niece back to Paris. Louise will pack Eve’s trunks and they will leave, unexpectedly and without farewells to anyone but you, Chantal. I myself will drive them to the station, to catch the night train.”
    “And then, Didier?” Marie-France asked.
    “And then, until she comes home, Eve will be remaining with you in Paris. What could be more normal? None of our friends will question it when we tell them. She will make a good recovery, as they will be happy to hear from us, and soon she will be well enough to enjoy the pleasures of Paris to the point that we will allow her to continue to live under your care and supervision until … until she comes home as she must, sooner or later.”
    “What makes you so sure?” his wife asked.
    “Because the kind of man who would run off with a girl like Eve must be so fundamentally bad that she will have to discover it for herself. Or he will tire of her. But, mark my words, from everything I’ve ever learned in my years as a doctor, she will be forced to come back to the one place she belongs, as soon as her life becomes difficult. After all, Evehas no money, no way to make a living, no skills, no abilities. She’s still a baby. She’ll come back, and with her reputation intact, so long as we all remember to play our parts. For that we are indebted to you, Marie-France.”
    “Oh, my dear, it’s nothing. I’ll do anything, anything at all. My poor little Eve … oh, I thought all along that you were too strict, Chantal, but I was wrong. You can’t be too strict, I see that now. Thank God I don’t have any children, that’s all I can say.”
    In a deliberate celebration of laziness, Eve stretched under the linen sheet and moaned in an excess of total well-being. Sleepily she glanced around for Alain, although she had already guessed from the quality of the sunlight in the room that once again she had slept late and he had gone out to rehearsal without waking her. Getting up in the late morning was still a novelty to Eve, but the rhythm of her days since she came to Paris was as different from the pace of Dijon as her newly kindled awareness of the possibilities of her body was different from the days when a good game of tennis had been enough to satisfy her.
    Eve was utterly enslaved by her sexual passion for Alain. Although in many ways he was a selfish man, he knew precisely how to take an inexperienced girl and train her appetites, an art few men ever had the leisure or the interest to perfect. Night by night, one deliberate, experienced, breathtaking step at a time, he led Eve down a pathway of erotic knowledge that most courtesans never trod in their lifetimes.
    It was early in the month of October, an October in which the languor and perfume of summer still blew in through the windows on warm breezes; sunny days followed by nights untouched by more than the faintest hint of autumn; a blissful, heady, lovers’ October that seemed as if it might last until spring; that final October of the Belle Epoque .
    Eve almost fell asleep again, but just as her eyes closed she remembered that today she had promised to have lunch with a new friend, or rather a new acquaintance who might become a friend. She lived across the landing