Walter Beddoes is thirty-five, a member of the U.S. Foreign Service, and used to spending months at a time in different countries, but he's always felt better upon returning home to Paris. Best of all, he thinks as he checks into his room for the first time in two months, he has Christina, his on-and-off-again girlfriend. To his mild annoyance, however, Christina refuses to cancel a date with someone else to have lunch with him. In three years, this has never happened. They make plans for tea in the late afternoon, but Beddoes, haunted by fears of aging and marriage, is disquieted. That afternoon at the bistro, their banter begins well, but more differences soon emerge. Christina has changed her hair, stopped drinking, and grown more serious. To his shock, she even has a date coming to meet them that very minute, and she refuses to shake him. Her date, Dr. John Haislip, a surgeon, sidles up and introduces himself just minutes later. Beddoes makes awkward, interrogatory conversation with him, instantly understanding that Haislip is in love with Christina. When Haislip gets up to make some calls, Christina breaks the news to Beddoes. She loves Haislip back, and she plans to marry him and move to Seattle. She's had enough of people like Beddoes — people over whom she has to cry at airports — and wants someone like Haislip, who would cry over her at an airport. Now that she's found him, she plans to commit to him. A distraught Beddoes bids her farewell. As he walks the darkening Champs-Elysees, tears stinging his eyes, he realizes that he has neither anyone he can call nor anyone he would even want to call.