Volume II continues to quote extensively from the letters written back and forth among the principals, together with those of a few other correspondents, notably Bim’s college friend Mildred Biddick, who was a prominent educator in Denver, and Sam Welles, who was Bim’s colleague in the State Department during the war and who then became a senior editor of Time and Life magazines.

Other developments are the dissolution of Bim’s longtime romance with the cowboy Slim and her marriage to the quixotic “Doc” Brockman, the death of Charles, the marriage of Roman colleague Esther to Doc’s best friend Verne Hofeditz, and the arrival of the exiled Albanian statesman Djafer Deva and his Austrian family, who lived with Bim and Esther in the late 1950s.

Finally, the volume ends with the death of Bim’s mother  Jen and Ronnie’s departure to Stanford University in 1962.