However, if such a choice is ever offered me again I shall invariably and unhesitatingly take the aged aunts and uncles—snuff, stuffed shirts and lorgnettes included. If you take them, the probabilities are against somebody’s taking pot shots at you in the middle of the night, just to mention one point. They also go to bed and stay there and are still there in the morning.
So I waited for them on my porch, watching the white wings of the sailboats dip and turn and dip again along the two-mile course in the bay. There must have been thirty sails out there. Even though I don’t like to sail, and am terrified when the water rushes past with me balanced perilously on the gunwale, I like to watch at a distance. This afternoon, against the sultry horizon, lowering, steel-gray with the threatening storm, they gleamed white and lovely, almost unbearably graceful and swift across the dark water.
My guests came just as I’d about decided to give them up and run over to see Rosemary, and after that a lot of other people came in, until it ended by all of us, Colonel Primrose included, going down to the club. It’s rather a custom, everybody gathering there before dinner, and it was even before the days of cocktails. As I’ve said, the clubhouse is the old Lloyd Poplar Hill mansion. The big eighteenth-century drawing room is the cocktail lounge now, with no one under seventeen allowed. There were a lot of people there, otherwise I suppose we should have found a sofa and a table by ourselves. As it was, we joined Sandra and Jim and Andy Thorp. They were glowing with triumph. Andy’s boat with Sandra at the tiller had come in first in the afternoon race. Lucy Lee, who’d been working like a beaver in the ladies’ sailing class, wasn’t there. She wasn’t good enough yet for that race, of course, but anyway she’d never be as good as her sister-in-law. Wherever Sandra Gould had been born, it was certainly on the water. She was better than any of the men, any except Andy.
“Gosh, she was marvelous!” Andy was saying. “You should have seen her when old Bill’s dory caught us astern! Have a drink, Grace—it’s my night to howl!”
“We’ll all have one,” I said. Louise Chetwynd introduced Colonel Primrose. They shook hands.
“He’s in the Army, or something,” Louise said. “Jim here used to be an admiral, but they didn’t like him so they put him out.”
“I was much too good for them,” Jim said, grinning. But he flushed a little as he shook hands with the rotund little man, who looks less like an officer than almost anyone I know.
“They put me out too,” Colonel Primrose said with a smile.
Someone pushed up a deep chintz-covered chair, but he shook his head. “That’s why they put me out. I can’t get up and down in club chairs like I used to, I’m afraid.”
He sat down in a straight-backed chair and took the tall frosted julep growing with fragrant mint which the boy offered, his black eyes snapping with pleasure. Sandra, having looked the men over, moved to the arm of Bill’s chair by him, and said, “Are you really a soldier?”
“Watch it, Colonel,” somebody said. “She’ll have your iron cross before you know it.”
Everybody laughed . . . everybody but Jim.
Jim wasn’t laughing at anything. He was sitting suddenly bolt upright in his chair, his face white as a sheet under its surface bronze, staring at the door.
I looked that way too. Rosemary Bishop was there.
I said, “Steady, old man,” under my breath, but it was too late. The julep in his hand hit the floor with a shivering crash.
“Why, Jeem!” Sandra cried.
Everybody in the room looked around, including Rosemary.
“Oh . . . how grand!” she cried, and came towards us, her arms outstretched.
“Oh, Grace! It’s marvelous to see you . . . I went by, through the old hedge, and they said you were here. Hello, Jim! Hello, everybody! It’s so nice to see you all!”
Sandra, leaning languorously back in the chintz fireside chair, introduced herself before any of us had a chance.
“And I am Sandra Gould . . . because, you see, he ees my Jeem now.”
I suppose it would have been all right in a New York speakeasy in prohibition days, with everybody making a point of not having any manners. Here and now it wasn’t only ill-bred, it was stupid. It brought into a suddenly sharpened focus just the difference between herself and Rosemary. It was so obviously throwing the glove in the rival’s face before it was decent.
Rosemary smiled.
“You’re a lucky girl—your Jim’s a very swell person!” she said, a barely perceptible emphasis on the “your.”
She looked at Jim and smiled again. Poor Jim! He tried to smile too, but he couldn’t.
“I . . . I didn’t know you were coming back,” he finally blurted out.
“Why, Jeem, darling! I told you this morning, at breakfast, and you said . . . what is eet so naughty you said? You said, ‘What the hell I care?’ Don’t you remembair, Jeem?”
There was a little appalled silence as she looked at him, so wide-eyed.
Then Rosemary laughed. “Sounds just like him,” she said. “Doesn’t it, Grace?”
“Precisely,” I said.
“But wait, here’s Dad.”
Rodman Bishop hadn’t changed, even if his daughter had. He was a little thicker, perhaps, but he had the same tanned rugged square face under the same thatch of thick white hair. But Rosemary had changed in seven years from an extremely pretty girl to one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen. Not particularly tall, but marvelously slim, with cool gray eyes, warm eggshell skin and pale gold hair. It wasn’t only that she was lovely. There was something else; something cool and immaculate and well-bred about her that made Sandra’s rather lush exotic beauty seem suddenly almost imperceptibly common. I looked at Sandra involuntarily. I think she realized it too. Her dark eyes smoldered. Two spots burned in her cheeks. But they might have been from the wind, or from the julep she had in her hand.
Rosemary looked around. “Where’s Paul, dad?”
“Just coming, with George. Here they are.”
If I hadn’t been looking at Sandra at just that moment, I’d never have seen the sharp surprise in her face as she looked up at the door, or the unbelievably malicious smile that flicked one corner of her red mouth and died, and was then suddenly marked in the depths of her dark eyes. She opened her bag, took out a gold enamel cigarette case and opened it.
“This is Mr. Dikranov—Grace Latham, Paul, I’m always talking about. Mrs. Gould . . .”
Sandra looked up, her face blankly innocent.
She held out her hand. “I’m so stupeed about names,” she murmured.
“Dikranov,” somebody said. I watched him looking at her. He didn’t seem to know her, or if he did he was a better actor than she was. There was nothing in his face that I could see. And a very handsome face it was, with fine chiseled features and olive skin, and black hair and brows. Paul Dikranov was tall and quite slender, and mature looking—I should have guessed he was nearer forty than Rosemary’s age. On the other hand,