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still be talking. I'd feel better if they'd have their revolution and get it over with—then he'd have nothing to do. As it is, there's no telling when he'll come home. We'll have your party anyhow."
    "It isn't necessary, you know."
    "Necessary?" My mother observed me with deliberation. "On the contrary, it's urgent. How else do you expect to become acquainted with decent society? That college of yours did nothing for you."
    "I expect it civilized me a bit."
    "Civilization contributes nothing toward marriageability," my mother remarked crisply: she had come brightly awake. "If anything, it detracts from it."
    "You know a great deal about marriage," I said. "You've had so much experience with it."
    "Don't be impudent—it sounds so labored, coming from you. Men have always wanted to marry me. It's not an original idea, but I don't hesitate to believe that I show a certain
écart.
"
    I was sure she meant
éclat
(her flights into foreignisms were usually unfortunate), but I let it pass.
    "An absence of civilization," I suggested.
    "Don't be too shrewd," advised my mother. "I may lack culture, but that's one of the privileges of wealth. I have an abundance of talents to make up for it. Moreover, my talents aren't clichés, like so many people's. It's not what I
can
do, but what I can't"
    "What you can't?" I repeated without expression, recovering the soaked paper boat; it dissolved into paste and grime under my fingers.
    "Certainly. I can't be ordinary. I can't bear that. I can't take anything seriously, and I can't be bored. I would rather go to sleep. And I can't understand myself—that's a talent too."
    "Or anyone else," I supplied.
    "What makes you say that? It would distress me to be somebody else even for a minute. But that doesn't mean I have no sympathies. I consider myself very sympathetic. If I weren't sympathetic I wouldn't be fretting about Enoch."
    "
Are
you fretting about him?"
    "Isn't it obvious? These impromptu conferences always worry me. I'm convinced they're dangerous. You read so much about assassinations these days."
    "No one," I offered with authority, "has been assassinated during the whole month of July."
    "Is July finished?" my mother said vaguely, beginning reluctantly to calculate. "But you'll be embarking in September! In that case I suppose we should plan to have the party the second or third week of August" It appeared she had already forgotten her anxiety, although it was so obvious, about Enoch's safety. "Well have a saxophone and some strings," she concluded confidently. "And the piano, of course."
    I reiterated—looking through the screen of rain—that I had no one to invite.
    "No one to invite!" my mother scoffed. "Don't worry about the guests. I shall ask them for you." And with unexpected vitality she threw off her dressing-gown and leaped into the downpour. In a moment her arms and hair were streaming; an eddy spun in the bow of her lip. "In the future I'll have cactus," she said, ripping the desiccated leaves from their stalks, "and cactus only! And if I take in a pet, it's to be a camel! I feel like a Bedouin come to an oasis!" she shouted, and gargled the rain that rushed from the awning. Barefoot, she stood with her long thighs apart, wetly skeined, and her face welcoming the deluge, like a nereid in a pre-Raphaelite painting, or one of those fountain-nymphs from whose mouths a pillar of water, full of the mystery of flow and return, ascends.
    In a few days the terrace had become a lake, with carpenters sloshing through it, carrying try squares—my mother had decided that a small dais should be built at the end of one room to accommodate the musicians. "Otherwise they'll be under/o‹," she insisted, snuffling: she had caught cold. She trotted about wrapped in a woolen shawl smelling of camphor. At length her sneezes gave way to coughs, and her coughs undertook to resemble the sound of a ragged bellows emerging from some remote area in her interior. But she would not go to bed. She