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person or persons. Thus a husband, drawing up a guest list for an evening party, might remark to his wife, “How about having the Caldwells?” (or the Muellers or the Kaplans). “Oh my God,” his wife would shriek, “do we have to have them ?” “I like them.” “They’re awful, and besides they won’t know anybody.” “They’re old friends of mine. I owe them something.” “Have them when I’m away then—you know they can’t stand me.” “Don’t be silly. They’d be crazy about you if you’d give them half a chance.” In desperation, the wife would cast about her. She saw her party, her charming, harmonious, mildly diversified party, heading straight for shipwreck on the rock of her husband’s stubbornness. Then all at once an inspiration would seize her. “Look,” she would say, in a more reasonable tone, “why don’t you ask Francis Cleary instead? He’d get along very well with these other people. And he’s your friend, just as much as Hugh Caldwell is. You’re wrong if you think it’s a matter of the Caldwells’ being your friends. It’s just that they wouldn’t fit in.” And the husband, reading the storm warnings as clearly as she, telling himself that if he insisted on the Caldwells his wife might treat them with impossible rudeness, and that even if she did not, she would make her concession an excuse for filling the house for months to come with her intolerable friends, that he might win the battle but lose the war, would reluctantly, grudgingly, consent. After all, Francis Cleary belonged to the circle of the detested Caldwells. To have him would be to have their spirit if not their substance, and, to be perfectly honest—he would say to himself—wasn’t it the principle of the Caldwells rather than their persons that was the issue at stake?
    Another hostess, on slightly better terms with the prospective host, or perhaps merely a better tactician, would begin differently. “Darling,” she would say, looking up from the memorandum pad on which already a few names had been neatly aligned. “I have an idea. Why don’t we ask Francis Cleary?” The air of discovery with which she brought forth this proposal would accord oddly with the fact that they always did have Francis Cleary at their parties, but the husband, who had been fearing something much worse (some old school friend or a marvelous singer she had met at a benefit), would in his relief not notice the anomaly. “All right,” he would say, grateful to her for her interest in this rather dull old business associate, and before he had time to change his mind, she would have telephoned Francis Cleary and secured his acceptance. Then, when the question of the Caldwells was raised, she would pout slightly. “Oh,” she would say, “don’t you think that makes too much of the same thing? After all, we’re having Francis Cleary, and I do think it’s a mistake to have a bloc at a party.” “I don’t know.” “Oh, darling, you remember the time we had all those Italians and they sat in the corner and talked to each other…”
    In either case, the outcome was the same. Francis Cleary would appear at the party, representing the absent, unassimilable Caldwells. He was their abstraction, their ghost. Unobtrusive, moderately well bred, he would come early and stay late. He made no particular social contribution, but the host, whenever he glanced in his direction, would feel a throb of solidarity with his own past, and at some point in the evening he and Francis Cleary would have a talk about the Caldwells and Francis would tell him all about Hugh Caldwell’s latest adventure. Not ordinarily a brilliant talker, in this particular field Francis Cleary was unsurpassed. He was a master of the second-hand anecdote, the vicarious exploit. Hugh Caldwell, who suffered dreadfully from asthma and had a distressing habit of choking and gasping in the middle of his sentences, never could have done himself the justice Francis