“Of course!” he barked, leaning forward a few inches, and repeated himself.

“You’re not intruding at all, Mr. Morrow. We couldn’t have made the trip without you,” she replied.

“Believe me, Miss Foster, the honor of sponsoring this historic journey was all mine.” He paused to beam. Like the rest of him, his dentistry was perfect and whispered of prosperity. “Of course, like the rest of the world, I’m only happy you’re alive and well. Alive and well,” he repeated, more loudly, because Irene was squinting with the effort of making him out.

“Oh, I guess it will all die down soon enough. I’m just an ordinary girl, after all, and I don’t much care for all the fuss.”

“An ordinary girl? Miss Foster.”

“It’s true, I’m as plain as could be. I just like to fly, that’s all.”

“Plain?” He laughed. “Don’t you see yourself at all? Plain? Ordinary? You’re extraordinary. By God, you’re the biggest sensation since Lindbergh. Those crowds out there”—he flung his arm to the window—“are here for you.”

“And Sam.”

“Sam, of course.” Mr. Morrow leaned back and set the cigar in an ashtray. Irene couldn’t help staring at his immaculate fingernails. It was funny how you forgot certain details about civilization, like how immaculate fingers could be. Now he laced them together and looked at her. He made a couple of false starts before he spoke again. “Miss Foster. Can I be candid with—”

Irene cupped her ear again. “I’m sorry.”

Morrow cleared his throat. “Can I be—oh, damn. Never mind. I only wish to say that I see a very bright future ahead for you. You’ve captured the imagination of the world. Books, lectures. You’ll be bigger than Lindbergh.”

Irene couldn’t hear every word. She wasn’t sure she understood him properly. Write books? “Sam’s going to write the book,” she said. “He already said so. He’s going to write a book about all this, and use the money to—to—well, to take care of his family.”

“People want to hear from you, Irene.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because you’re a woman, Irene, and the world’s fascinated with women. Women with a sense of adventure, women who can take on men at their own game. The emancipated woman, she’s the spirit of the age.” Morrow lifted his cigar from the ashtray and pointed it at Irene’s mouth. “You, Irene. People want to hear from you. They can’t get enough of you.”

Irene was so exhausted, she didn’t want to argue. She couldn’t think through an argument, couldn’t put together any kind of complex thought or sentence. “But I just want to fly,” she said again.

Morrow reached to tap the ash from the end of his cigar. He rose from his chair and approached the window, which looked out over a sunny, chilly Sydney Harbor. It was winter here, after all. Morrow braced one hand against the window frame and gazed out across the sun-dappled water. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket, just his trousers and stiff white shirt and waistcoat, neatly buttoned, conservative dove gray. The blue smoke of his cigar trailed around him. Its rich scent was altogether different from Sam’s cigarettes. Irene, sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown, felt woozy with the need to sleep. Morrow seemed to disappear into his blue fog. Her eyelids sank downward. Just as she began to doze off, Morrow appeared next to her on the sofa, so close their knees almost touched.

“Miss Foster, I don’t mean to be importunate—” He stopped, coughed, and continued in a louder voice, close to her ear. “And I realize it’s none of my business, as a mere friend. But as a manager—as your business manager—I feel it’s incumbent upon me to ask . . .”

Irene picked at the edge of her robe. “Ask what?”

“Whether there’s anything you should tell me, about you and Mr. Mallory.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“Irene, they’re going to ask, those reporters. Maybe not in so many words. But the whole world’s dying to know—a man and a woman, stranded on an island together—don’t tell me you don’t understand my meaning.”

Over on the armchair, Sandy lifted her head and licked a paw. Irene set down the hem she’d been picking and smoothed it over the bump of her knee.

“No,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to tell you about Sam and me.”

Morrow held her gaze for a second or two, just to see if she’d back down, she thought. So she didn’t. He turned away and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “All right, then. I can see you’re tired. Get yourself some rest. We’ll discuss all this in the morning over breakfast.”

“You and me and Sam.”

“Of course.”

Morrow’s jacket lay over the back of the armchair. He rose and hooked it with his finger. As he picked up his hat, he looked Irene’s way and smiled.

“I like the new hairdo, Miss Foster. It suits you.”

The hairdo, of course, was to become iconic: a symbol of the age and the women who peopled it, of this daring new generation of females. To millions of admirers, those short curls meant freedom and courage. Certainly they attracted attention. In the many photographs that survive from the press conference after the Centauri’s miraculous arrival in Sydney, Irene Foster’s hair seizes the camera’s fascination: a riotous gold mop glimmering under the lights like some kind of beacon for the brave new world.

Naturally, the reporters wanted to know how and when and why she had cut her hair. And Irene—who was still exhausted, remember, who had napped only briefly before Morrow knocked again on the door of her hotel suite to summon her to her public—let down her guard for a single sentence, the only sentence. She glanced at Sam, who sat at her side; Sam glanced at her, and they shared a smile. “Sam cut it for me, on our third day on Howland,” she said. “Long hair just gets in the way of everything, doesn’t it?”

The photographers present that day were not stupid. A cavalcade of flashbulbs and camera shutters captured that shared smile, which was reproduced on millions of sheets of newsprint within twenty-four hours, was thrown up on thousands of newsreel screens within a week, was printed in countless magazines and books over the years, was later expanded to gigantic proportions for museum exhibits and popular art. It became, in the collective imagination, a visual shorthand for two separate though related aspects of twentieth century life: for the unique and private connection that exists between two people deeply in love and for a moment in history when an equal standing between man and woman—the possibility for adventure shared, for genuine partnership—became possible.

Humans being as they are, of course, the fact that both Sam and Irene married other people only made it all the more intriguing.

Following the press conference, there was a gala dinner, then a tour of the city the next day in the company of the mayor, in which Sam and Irene (accompanied by George Morrow) appear to have met at least half the civil servants in the entire province. There was a luncheon with the Sydney Ladies Auxiliary, a military ball given by the Australian Flying Corps, a private lunch at the new Government House in Canberra with Lord Stonehaven, the governor-general of Australia, followed by a formal dinner with the prime minister and senior members of government, along with their wives. Various additional public appearances filled in the gaps of this bruising schedule.

To Irene it all passed in a blur, or rather a jumble. She felt like a doll, dressed up—Morrow had ordered an entire wardrobe for her—and paraded about at event after event, saying the same things to an endless receiving line of people, giving variants of the same speech, more or less, she had delivered to the panjandrums of Honolulu. What she did not experience was time to herself. Each day, Morrow left her at her hotel suite at midnight and rapped on her door at half past seven, so that she had neither time nor energy to do anything else except stumble to bed and sleep deeply, dreamlessly, for the hours allotted. Not only was she never left alone with Sam, they had no opportunity to arrange a private meeting. It was Morrow, Morrow, Morrow, all day long.

On their fifth night in Australia, Irene rang up the switchboard and asked to be connected to Sam, but the operator told her she was unable to put through any calls to that suite without permission. Irene explained that this was Miss Foster, room 205. The operator apologized and said it was still impossible. The next morning, when Morrow’s attention was momentarily distracted, Irene told Sam. “I tried the same thing,” he said. “With the same result. I’d have marched right down the hall to see you, but Morrow’s got guards posted outside my door and yours.”

“That’s for protection from the public,” said Irene.

“Sure it is,” said Sam.

When Morrow returned to the breakfast table a moment later, Sam said, “What gives with the telephone lines? I can’t get a call in to Irene.”

“Of course not,” said Morrow. “Because any operator on that switchboard could listen in to your conversation, and every word would appear verbatim in the next morning’s papers.”