LOOKING BACK, LUCY WARNER FOUND IT HARD TO believe that she’d ever seriously considered Roth’s proposal to run away to her family house in Maine. Her mother was there, for one thing, and the woman had taken a very dim view of Lucy’s hasty marriage and divorce the year before. Still, despite an almost abject wish to regain her mother’s approval, Warner might have run away with Roth to somewhere if he hadn’t expressed a curious concern about becoming too attracted to his stepdaughter as “she got a little older.” “That was an alarm bell for me,” Warner remembered.
