Lea and Mark are a copy editor and reporter respectively at the Denver Post. Mark pays little notice of her due to the difference in their status, and Lea doesn't much like Mark in his moodiness - he is even referred to as "Moody Mark" by their colleagues - and because he is a little too loose in the way he uses the English language which she always has to correct in his pieces. Their editor is looking for the feature story for their holiday edition, so Lea proposes one on the new post-war French painting at the Museum of Modern Art by an anonymous artist signing it solely by "F" with an enigmatic unknown female figure in the painting only being called Ma Fleur by the artist. Lea recently came into possession of a musical jewelry box from that era in which she found in a hidden compartment an incomplete journal