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other side of her room. Trapped, beyond calling for help in a houseful of servants, her situation strikes her as absurd. She is thinking of what Alan said. Why hadn’t she asked Alan to dine with her? He always made a great fuss about it being time to leave, checking that enormous turnip of a watch, clicking his tongue, but Edith knows that he never has any place to go, except back to his little rooms in Krystal Gade and his mystery magazines. His dinner is a sandwich and tea with Ellery Queen. Lovers indeed! Though once, in an older, more naïve, almost-forgotten time, someone (yes, it was Alan) at a masquerade ball (how romantic it sounds!) lifted his mask and kissed her behind a stiff little palm tree in a dark garden. It was another Alan and another Edith then, but she remembers the look on his face, poor thing: terror! From having kissed Meredith Harper’s daughter. Outside, through the open windows, the sun is setting, the garden is taking its dim colors of evening, and is being peopled with its night sounds—the voices of dead populations in the old trees. “Edie, Edie, fat and greedy—”
    â€œThere is a certain value in anonymity, Edith,” she hears her mother say. “But whether we like it or not we will always be Harpers.”
    Seeing him at last across the cocktail party, Leona murmurs “Excuse me” to the people she has been talking to, and makes her way toward him through the considerable crowd on the terrace. She waves to him over heads, but he does not see her and stands, drink in hand, alone, on the steps, looking oddly lost and bewildered. Dear old Eddie, why does he always look—wherever he is—as though he didn’t belong there, as though he had found himself an unwilling tourist in a foreign-speaking city where he did not even know how to ask the way to the nearest hotel? “Hey!” she calls to him. “Here I am!” But he does not see her until she is practically in front of him, waving her fingers in his face. “Hey, remember me?” she says. He grins and seizes her elbow. “Who the hell are these people, anyway?” he asks her.
    â€œThe cream of the Winter Colony.” Then she whispers, “But dolts. Dolts and bores. Quick—let’s escape. Let’s hide from this party.” She takes his hand and they run down the steps.
    â€œWhere’ll we hide?”
    â€œBehind the arras—anywhere where we can talk.”
    â€œFind an arras. I’m with you.”
    As they run along the edge of the terrace someone calls, “Leona?” And Leona whispers to Eddie Winslow, “Don’t answer! Hide!” And she runs with him down a gravel walk between banks of sea-grapes and out onto a strip of dark beach. The light from Scorpion Rock sweeps across their faces and Leona says, “Now quick—give me a cigarette and tell me what you thought of her!” He hands her a cigarette and holds a match to it. Then he lights one of his own.
    â€œI think she’s terrific,” he says, waving out the match.
    â€œWasn’t I right, Eddie? There’s your story!”
    He kneels and pats the sand. “Dry,” he says. “Can we sit down?”
    Leona kicks off her shoes and kneels beside him on the beach which is still warm from the sun.
    â€œYour grandmother told me she swims half a mile every day in her pool—in the nude.”
    Leona laughs. “Well, that’s color for you! What else?”
    â€œBut the main thing was, she honestly doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about your great-uncle.”
    â€œI told you that. But don’t you see , Eddie? Granny’s your story—not him. Everybody knows Uncle Harold’s a stinker! Where’s the news in that? But Granny—how many like her are there left? She’s a vanishing breed, Eddie—the end of an era. She’s a—a kind of symbol of what the old West Indies used to be. All the other