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when in a final gratuitous flutter they traveled down to my very coccyx, before fading away.
    “There,” said Iris with exactly the same intonation as that used, at the end of a more special kind of treatment,by one of my Cambridge sweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.
    She, Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes and turned to her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds in the blue-green inward of every advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleek forebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam—and, oh, there it comes, the crested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, I understood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation, how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccable complexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile of her high cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the
accroche-coeur
of a sleek little flirt.
    “By the way,” said Iris as she changed from a kneeling to a half-recumbent position, her legs curled under her, “by the way, I have not apologized yet for my dismal remark about that poem. I now have reread your “Valley Blondies” (
vlyublyonnost
’) a hundred times, both the English for the matter and the Russian for the music. I think it’s an absolutely divine piece. Do you forgive me?”
    I pursed my lips to kiss the brown iridescent knee near me but her hand, as if measuring a child’s fever, palmed my forehead and stopped its advance.
    “We are watched,” she said, “by a number of eyes which seem to look everywhere except in our direction. The two nice English schoolteachers on my right—say, twenty paces away—have already told me that your resemblance to the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is
a-houri-sang
—they know a little French. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I’ll beg you to leave. I’ve been sufficiently hurt in my life.”
    A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When a girl starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience.
    Had I posted the poem to that
émigré
paper? Not yet; my garland of sonnets had had to be sent first. The two people (lowering my voice) on my left were fellow expatriates, judging by certain small indices. “Yes,” agreed Iris, “they practically got up to stand at attention when you started to recite that Pushkin thing about waves lying down in adoration at her feet. What other signs?”
    “He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked at the horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece.”
    There was also a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball in her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frilly harness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She was what in a later era amateurs were to call a “nymphet.” As she caught my glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under her auburn fringe.
    “At eleven or twelve,” said Iris, “I was as pretty as that French orphan. That’s her grandmother all in black sitting on a spread Cannice-Matin with her knitting. I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I played indecent games with Ivor—oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefers dons to donnas—at least that’s what he says.”
    She talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidence had died on the same day, she at seven A.M . in New York, he at noon in London, only two years ago. They had separated soon after the war. She was American and horrible. You don’t speak like that of your mother but she was really horrible. Dad was Vice President of the Samuels Cement Company when he died. He came from a respectable family and had “good connections.” I asked what grudge exactly did Ivor bear to “society” and vice versa? She vaguely replied he disliked the “fox-hunting set” and the “yachting