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radio. They walked slowly because that pace was suited to the day of mourning and to her son’s small legs; yet, after a time, the slowness began to annoy her. There seemed to be too much imposed upon her in that slowness, the dependent age of the child and the tremendous death of one great man.
    In the evening, among the patrons of the lounge—among the men who, although they were subdued by the death, were nevertheless bathed and shaved and manicured and brilliantined and brushed and polished, and anticipative of pleasures that night with the women beside them or women waiting somewhere else—she gave herself up to the exciting paradox of the living opulently mourning the dead, and something more came into her consciousness of the magnitude of the world. At night in the bar with the changing patrons, the changing faces in the dimness moving in and out of her vision with more fluidity, more grace, because of the solemnity of the night, she realized, more than earlier with her son, the extent of a great man’s effect upon the world, the extent of the power he seemed to have even after his death, the extent of power over death that all these men seemed to have. She sang the president’s favorite song, and the pianist played it over and over again, pounding it out like a dirge while the solemn drinking went on at the tables.
    Her father came in with Adele and with the actress who was to have helped Paul into the movies, a woman small and delicate, with a broad, flat-boned, powdered face, her shoulders emerging tense and arrogant from her ample fur coat. With her was the actor Max Laurie, a tragic comedian, always in each of his movies in love with the hero’s woman. A civilian at the table next to them, whose shoulder was near to Max’s, leaned over between him and the actress, gazing with a pretense of idolatry from one to the other, amusing his two companions, two men, with his intrusion into the glamorous company.
    â€œIt’s a sad day,” he said to Max. “You agree with me it’s a sad day?”
    â€œWe agree,” said the actress.
    The man turned his head to look at the actress appealingly, a flicker of ridicule crossing his face. “Anybody who disagrees is a dog,” he said.
    â€œNobody disagrees,” said the actress.
    â€œYou ever met him?” the man asked. “They say he liked the company of actors and actresses. Banquets and entertainments, he liked that. Like a king, you can say, with his jesters. I thought you might have met him.”
    â€œNever did,” she said, turning her back on him, drawing up her fur coat that lay over her chair so that the high collar barred his face. Then she turned abruptly back, as she would have on the screen, while the man’s face was still surprised by the fur collar. “Are you envious because you won’t die great?” she asked him.
    â€œI’m living great, that’s all I want,” he said, and his companions laughed. “If you want to know another fact of life, because you don’t know all of them, it’s this: If you’re living great, the odds are you’ll die great. Like in the arms of some beautiful woman, right smack in her boodwah.” And while his companions laughed, he looked around at Max and at Vivian and at her father, and since they were not regarding him with annoyance, he looked again, boldly, into the face of the actress.
    â€œHe was a wonderful man,” said Max, his rich voice conciliatory, simple. “I met him myself. A bunch of us were out making speeches for him, can’t remember if it was his first term or his twelfth.” He had a way of lowering his eyes when everybody laughed and glancing up with a smile that suspected, shyly, that he was lovable.
    â€œWhat was your name?” the man asked.
    â€œMax Laurie,” he said.
    â€œIs that Jewish or is it Scotch?” the man asked and everybody at both tables laughed. “He