“Well, if not American crowds, how about the British? Some of the expat literary crowd are still here. I believe the writer Somerset Maugham hosts a literary salon at his villa, La Mauresque, on the tip of Cap Ferrat.”
“A literary salon!”
“We infiltrated Miss Gertrude Stein’s salon and survived, I’m sure we can muddle our way through another if we put out minds to it. Imagine, we might see Rudyard Kipling or H. G. Wells there,” said Charley, supremely confident that we could pull off this very dubious idea. “We might’ve bumped into Mr. Wells walking through Grasse and not been aware of it... If only we’d known what he looked like. Apparently”—Charley lowered her voice so as not to scandalize Tilly’s fine sensibilities nearby notwithstanding that Tilly had declared the previous day that s
