He was applying to law schools when J. C. Penney, which two years earlier had turned down his first business proposal, for a watch repair franchise from which he naively figured he could retire after 18 months if things worked out, called and offered a jewelry store in Lake Success, N.Y.
Naively chivalric, he thought he was working for her, writing often to lay his devotion at her feet.
They met in Cardiff, where the Worcester-born Hyde was an art-school graduate specialising in sound and video installations and Smith was studying electronic and electrical engineering because he thought, naively, that he would learn to build his own synthesisers.
Perhaps he thought, naively, that he could be rich and a disciple of Jesus, that discipleship would not be too demanding after all.
Lest anyone think that his acquaintance with the Muslim world has been naively emollient, he stresses that he was strongly influenced by a group of Trappist monks in Algeria, seven of whom were murdered in 1996.
This is the story of Michael Westen, a spy who is suddenly "burned" - or, for the non-espionagically-trained among you - disavowed by the US government for whom he had, perhaps naively, assumed he had been doing a pretty good job.
"Berbizier took a risk," wrote the Observer's Eddie Butler in the aftermath a week later, "but if he was guilty of naively supposing he could change Moscato's habits of a lifetime, he wasn't helped by the journalistic interventions of England's Brian Moore.
He naively believed that he could turn Iraq not only into a stable state but also into a shining democracy.
