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with an English-sounding name, was a man whose occupation, so far as Kraven could tell, was chairing boards. Kraven had encountered him a few times in the lobby or in the elevator. They now exchanged nods, New York custom happily not requiring verbal greeting. Kraven in fact, and Poore-Moody no doubt too, regretted the first of these exchanges, for it had immediately enforced a pattern from which it now seemed impossible to depart.
    Poore-Moody was a stocky pouter-pigeon of a man in his mid-sixties, a dead ringer for the late Mussolini. Who would have suspected that those thick short fingers, heavily matted with hair, were capable of the most exquisite petit-point? And yet such was the case. Kraven had seen examples of his work in the Poore-Moody apartment. And Stella had told him, on one of the rare occasions when she spoke to him of her husband, that Poore-Moody had for years engaged in warm correspondence with an English duke living in Paris, himself an accomplished amateur.
    But on Thursday nights, with a regularity broken only by a necessary business trip, an occasional illness, and of course holidays, Poore-Moody drove his Bentley out to Brewster for a poker game with ‘the boys’. Kraven could much more easily imagine him playing poker than plying a needle. His low brow fairly cried out for the extension a green eyeshade would grant. At any rate, from about eight on a Thursday evening until four or five on a Friday morning, Poore-Moody was gone. The vacuum his absence caused, abhorrent to nature, was filled by Kraven.
    And this vulgar little man had been happily married to the marvellous Stella for more than twenty years. What could she possibly have seen (still see) in him? Not money, for Stella herself was moneyed, a daughter of the Boston Devereux. If not money. Then what? Sex? Of that possibility Kraven preferred not to think. Besides, it was clear to him that she also felt a warm affection for her husband – and a ferocious loyalty that forbade Kraven to talk to her of him and forbade her (except infrequently and then only appreciatively) to speak to Kraven of her husband.
    Nor was this abiding love for her husband, especially in view of her passionate adultery, the most puzzling of Stella’s oddities. Her breeding, education, and social ambience, after all, were quintessentially WASPian. She was a product of the best eastern schools, with a BA from Bryn Mawr and an MA from Harvard. Her Harvard thesis, in fact, had won a University Prize and was subsequently published as
The Perils of Parzifal: Proto-Cinematic Aspects of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Serial Romance
. Moreover, she engaged in Good Works, sought the Elevation of the Downtrodden, attended Charitable Evenings; in short, she expressed the Cultured Liberalism and Social Conscience of those who dieted from choice. Sometimes, when Kraven lay palpitating on the Poore-Moody couch, he heard Stella speak on the telephone to her social peers. There was no mistaking the cultured tones, the assurance of place, the sense of belonging, the familiar allusions to people with such absurd names as Muffin and Bunny, Lolly and Wills.
    And yet with Kraven this American blue-blood, this offspring of the nation’s historical élite, became a drab, a scullion, a daughter of the game. Sex became her
raison d’être
, food an important preliminary to fornication, vulgarity her mode. Proud of her cuisine, she refused to employ a cook. Kraven had seen on the weekly menu-charts pinned to her kitchen bulletin board the gustatory promise of
boeuf Wellington, truite amandine, pigeonneau à la crapaudine
. For him, however, she prepared liver and onions, corned beef and cabbage, or (as, for example, tonight) lasagna.
    Why she should have elected to play this role with him he was unable to say. She had drawn him into a kind of Lawrentian triad, a grotesque parody, in which Lady Chatterley was actually married to the brutish Mellors and sought her sexual-spiritual salvation in an