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Perhaps twice a year the Harrisons gave a large party, seventy-five or a hundred guests crowding the living room, crowding the patio, crowding the kitchen, crowding. Otherwise their guests were two, or four, or rarely six (the heavy oak table, almost medieval, requiring no cloth, was Joe’s idea; it seated eight comfortably), and the evening was food, drink, and talk, and now and then a little music. No games. The Harrisons did not like games.
    Among their friends were a rancher; a painter; odd executives; stray musicians; newspapermen; a writer, “Hollywood,” female, and a writer, “serious,” male, each of whom was coming more and more to wish he were the other; the secretary of a Hollywood labor union; a colonel—one of Joe’s old officers—who was a quiet disciple of Henry George; a professor of crystallography; a fair-to-middling actress whom Helen had known in college; a man named Stearns whom Joe had heard, at a P.T.A. meeting, display, within half an hour, unseemly and witty irreverence for the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Congress of the United States, the President’s cabinet, Russian literature, French literature, English painting, German cooking, Chinese philosophy, and Cecil B. DeMille: these and their wives, husbands, mistresses and lovers of the moment were the Harrisons’ friends.
    And now, today, at sunset on a May afternoon, Helen was depressed.
    She poured herself a drink. The day had been eventful. Item: Dave had found a hornets’ nest, smoked out the torpid residents, and proclaimed his desire to tack the nest above the front door as a warning to future vespid marauders. Item: Sally had taken the mare out and come home with the conviction that twenty acres was insufficient land. “Really. You just barely get started and there you are home again. Or trotting in circles.” Animals. Three dogs—four, now; a battalion of cats, black, white, gray, ginger, torn and tabby, striped and barred, responding to names like Vespasian, Irving Thalberg, Barney Oldfield, William Randolph Hearst, Domenico Theotocopuli, and Thomas Aquinas—or not responding (they led their lives, Helen led hers); and the mare and the stallion, who were more traditionally, if not less suggestively, named Guinevere and Lancelot.
    The telephone rang. She went into the house, and passed a bookshelf. She was reading The Charterhouse of Parma. She had never read it before and she did not like it. It was natural to linger at the bookshelf; for a moment she forgot the telephone. It rang again. More and more now she liked to reread. She liked Dostoevsky in spite of Mr. Stearns. She liked Dickens in spite of many people; she liked Malraux, but felt left out; she liked Thomas Wolfe, but had not read him for years.
    There is no book like Joe, she thought. But books are always there when you want them.
    Her hand closed over the receiver.
    Mr. Arthur Rhein, who was aging, rich, and querulous, occupied the two-story penthouse of a new building to the north of the city. The structure was an upended rectangular prism slashed boldly by trite horizontal accents: bands of window, streaks of color. Rhein’s quarters consisted of ten rooms, six on the seventeenth floor and four on the eighteenth. These rooms were furnished heterogeneously, to say the least. The apartment as a whole contained an example (and often more than one) of bad taste from every major historical period of Western civilization. His Roman room was dominated by an appalling Empire (French, of course) divan; the room’s Romanity consisted of half a dozen execrable casts of inferior egg-eyed busts, ranged about a central (and dry) fountain that could only have been a bird bath for Libyan buzzards. His French room was really quite good; it was cluttered with the kind of furniture still found in ancien régime French households: rickety, tortuously ornamented chairs and tables, desiccated and, in use, audible;