As they sat reading in this fine silence that had been given to them, there was a knock on the bedroom door, and the beautiful people, the lovers, came into the room, dressed for an evening in the night clubs: Echo O’Brien, her slim body sheathed in black and teetering elegantly on the spiked heels of her black slippers, drops of topaz depending from her ears and throat; and at her side, Berry-berry Williams, eyes alight with pride in his companion and the deep pleasure he took in his own animal beauty; his necktie, like his smile, ever so slightly askew, a subtle and good-natured mockery of the manners and customs of the tame and the ordinary. Together they had come into the room to give, from their bounty, this staggering glimpse of themselves, a marvel of luminosity like the glow of angels.

When they had said goodbye and started down the stairs, Annabel and Ralph and Clinton looked at one another and shared, at that moment, the same mindless, wordless sense of wonder. But no one of these three persons knew how often, in the future, this moment would be dredged up in memory, to be looked at and savored, and endlessly pondered.

Ralph soon fell asleep, and Annabel declared herself ready to retire as well. She gave Clinton a good-night kiss and went into the bathroom for her nightly preparations of cold cream and hairpins.

Clinton went to his own room. He thumbed through his notebook and picked up his fountain pen. But he found that he had no desire to record all of the small happenings of the day: Echo’s arrival, and the evidence, so trifling as to be almost imaginary, that he had found to support his own fears in her behalf. When a day had been as nearly perfect as this one, it seemed to him that any impulse to dwell on its defects should be thwarted as unwholesome, even wicked. Perhaps, in a few minutes, when Annabel was in bed, he would take his notebook downstairs to her desk, and catch up on the week’s mail. But as he lay back on his pillow, to wait for her to finish in the bathroom, his eyes closed, and soon he was fast asleep.