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to be a sucker than a sourpuss. But I long, oh, how I truly long, Jean-Marie, to get things into focus. I’m nearly twenty-five. I have a feeling about this year—Fate! Kismet! Nemesis! My number coming up.’
    ‘For that have another drink!’
    ‘Yes, let’s. Oh, Jesus Q., but it’s a puzzle. Yet do you know we’re so communal, Americans, I sort of believe socialism must be our destiny. Do you know that Eugene V. Debs, a railroad fireman, a socialist, polled one million votes for President in 1920, and everyone thought the robber barons were going to have to cede their fortresses. So they offered up Sacco and Vanzetti, I guess. Circuses if no bread.’
    ‘What’ll you drink? Martini? I’ll buy a bottle and make my own; they don’t get it dry enough.’
    ‘I’m not much of a drinker. Anything.’
    When he returned with two glasses and two bottles, she said, ‘I wish you’d tell me what to read. This is my chance away from the sludge-mills to catch up a bit. I couldn’t learn anything in college. I was working at night. Now I write informative articles about subjects I’ve never given a minute’s thought to. Woe, woe! I make a living and it’s not an honourable one.’
    ‘Make it some other way.’
    ‘You don’t think I can? I can play the piano, sing a bit, I did an act with a boy, went around. But I wanted to be a writer. Maybe I could go to Hollywood and be a gagman. What an ambition! Alas, poor Yorick. Just another skull in the charnel house, at a time when skulls come very cheap. Our life doesn’t bear thinking of, does it, Jean-Marie? A flash and then join the majority.’
    ‘Every man who says, “Why struggle? Look up there! The stars are millions of years old,” turns out to be a crook; he has his eye on your pocket.’
    ‘Ah, something starts up in my soul when I hear those sibylline words,’ said Emily laughing and quaffing; ‘as well as everything else, I guess I’m a crook too. Nothing inhuman is alien to me.’
    The next day she wore cream slacks, a pink and white sweater striped horizontally, and her white jacket with a pink neckcloth, knotted to one side. In the outfit she looked larger, rosier, younger. Her hair she had tied on top so that the long curling strands, windblown and dust-coloured, fell over her cheeks and neck.
    The deckchairs were set out, but differently. Mrs Browne was sitting in the shelter of the sports lounge and seemed not to see her. In the cabin before breakfast she had said to Emily, ‘Because we’re cabin-mates you don’t have to keep me company. I’m a lonely person and used to it. My husband is like you, gregarious. To me such people are dependent.’
    ‘OK,’ said Emily. That’s the lesson for today, she said to herself. She did not know whether Mrs Browne, who spoke only once a day, thought these things out during her silent hours, or whether she had a few texts to run her life by.
    Emily sat in her chair in the sun beside a man who turned out to be a Romanian and reading Henry James in Romanian.
    How wonderfully exciting the world is! You just have to travel.
    ‘I haven’t even read Henry James in the original,’ said Emily; and though he was polite and even gay, she felt the man lost interest in her.
    The sun shone, the breeze tickled and after trying to memorize a few sentences of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, a book everyone was then reading, and her copy given her at the boat by her brother, she became restless and went to look for Jean-Marie.
    ‘Honest contempt, bad temper, is what I want—hometalk! No melancholy damnation as with Mrs Browne, no chewed-over headlines as with Mrs Cullen.’
    She found him. Presently they went to the bar lounge. The lounge, so early, with views each side of the sunny sea, full of blue-green ditches with top frostings of foam, had a fresh innocent air. The floor was clean, the chairs and tables neat. They sat on one of the long benches waiting for the bar to open.
    ‘The sailor’s snug harbour,’