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Despite the story's carefully hidden sordid blotches—only a romantic musical 100 years hence will entirely erase them—and despite the determinedly sentimental tone ("any woman who has been loved as I have been loved"), a touch of dignity, be it of Windsor or of Baltimore, still shines through. But many a reader may linger longest over the remarkably gentle, paternal letters written to Wallis by Ernest Simpson after the King's abdication. They contain a question Author Windsor must sometimes ask herself: "And would your life have ever been the same if you had broken it off?"
* The family always ran together Bessie (for an aunt) and Wallis (for her father). She eventually made it just Wallis, a name she always preferred because "so many cows are called Bessie."