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give me more than that.”
    He had to stop for a light. The Randalora Club was south of the city. It made an inconvenient drive through town to get to it. Jane had turned sideways in the seat. She was frowning. “She doesn’t care about the things that count around here, Fletch. You know, she wasn’t pleased that we put them up for membership. Just sort of amused. As if it was some kind of a game for kids. As if she was above and beyond all that sort of thing. And when we were house-hunting, she was really almost rude.”
    “How?”
    “Well, the house she liked, the one they took—I tried to tell her in a nice way that it wasn’t a very fashionable neighborhood. She had a queer look, you know. You can’t tell whether she’s laughing at you or not. She told me she’d try to keep the house fashionable on the inside.”
    “Doesn’t sound like much to condemn her for, Jane.”
    “Don’t start defending her. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up. I have a feeling about her. She just doesn’t care about the things that matter, and you remember what I’m saying. Because she doesn’t care, she also doesn’t care what she does or what she says. And it may come back on us that we put them up for membership. He’s all right, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
    He laughed. “Oh, come now! What’s she going to do? A strip tease in front of the bandstand?”
    “That’s what I’m trying to say. If she decided it was a good thing to do, she’d go right ahead and do it, and I can see the look on her face while she does it. Like she was laughing at the whole club.”
    “Why don’t you suggest it? It’ll make talk for the whole summer.”
    “Fletch, you just aren’t taking me seriously. You ought to know by now that I’m pretty good at sizing up people. Remember the gum on the hat?”
    “How can I forget it when you bring it up once a month?”
    She giggled. “I’ll never forget how mad you got.”
    Fletcher remembered. A pleasant young man had come to the door. He wore a pale grey felt hat. He calmly took acud of gum out of his mouth, squashed it against the hat, then rubbed the smeared place on the floor until it was badly smudged. Then he brought out a small bottle, poured some of the fluid on a cloth and calmly removed the greasy mass, leaving no stain. Fletcher had bought a giant-size sealed bottle of that wonder cleaner for five dollars. It turned out to be a benzine solution so weak that it had no more effect on a spot than plain water. And while the transaction had been going on, Jane had managed to get close enough to Fletcher to whisper, “Dear, I don’t like his looks.”
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be looking forward to that strip tease. Little on the scrawny side though, isn’t she?”
    “Don’t kid yourself, my friend. That little lady is stacked. She just doesn’t wave it around.”
    They turned into the club drive at quarter after six. He was going to drop her at the door, but she told him to head right on into the parking area and she’d walk back with him. Some die-hard golfers were teeing off. The pool was full of young people. The bastard-château interior of the club was gloomy and unpopulated. Fletcher hung his straw hat in the nearly empty check room and they walked through to the terrace, which overlooked the eighteenth green, yet was set high enough to be safe from overexuberant approach shots.
    They stood in the doorway. Most of the terrace tables were filled. The white-coated waiters scurried around with trays that tinkled. They nodded and smiled at friends.
    “There they are in the corner,” Jane said. They walked between the tables. As Fletcher followed Jane, automatically smiling and speaking to friends and acquaintances, he was thinking of Jane’s description of Laura Corban’s attitude. Maybe the girl had something. Shouldn’t take membership in an outfit like this too seriously. It was just one of the ways, perhaps, that people managed to segregate