Philip McAllister, I was thinking, was one of those men in whom there lingers the perfectionism of childhood, who, when his stature was Lilliputian, saw the world as titanic, saw love centered in a goddess as a principle of salvation, as the meaning of that large, floating life, seeming so shapeless and so wonderful, like the shifting clouds of summer which veil and unveil the sun, that life he thought might vanish before he had sprung forth from his dwarfish body. We say of such people erroneously that they have never “grown up.” We should say instead that they grew up too quickly, skipping certain years and finding themselves flowering, alone, and in the snow, months before the spring. The phantom he had been pursuing all his life, and which he believed was at last entrapped in this girl whom he had loved intermittently for many years, had escaped him and the love with which he thought to imprison her had dematerialized, leaving him without love and without an object to try to love.

I was coming from the Countess’ and was on my way to the young McAllisters’ house where they were having a cocktail party and I was going over, with distaste, the conversation I had just had with my earlier hostess. Having summoned me over the phone that morning to have luncheon with her, she began, the moment we had left the dining-room for the library, to state her object. It was nothing more than simply to satisfy her curiosity. For some months past, indeed, ever since Philip and Hopestill had come back from a wedding trip to Canada, everyone had been slightly or greatly (depending on the extent of his prejudices) shocked by the almost constant presence in their house of Harry Morgan. The Countess von Happel wanted to know what I thought of it. Had I any idea why such otherwise attractive people set loose upon their guests a person of such execrable manners, such unrelenting buffoonery? He was addicted to imitations and in the course of a single evening recently, the Countess declared, had “done” President Roosevelt at a cocktail party, Katharine Hepburn at a psychiatrist’s, a Negro on trial for murder, a priest confronted by Mae West. There was little to distinguish one from another and no one could understand how he could delude himself into thinking he had the least gift for mimicry. “If he’s as inexpert at architecture as he is at imitations,” remarked the Countess, “the Concord house will be a scandal.” The Concord house was already in a sense a scandal, for Hopestill and Morgan spent a great deal of time there, often without Philip and without any more chaperonage than that of the carpenter or the gardener.

Did I believe, as some people did, that Philip was perhaps endeavoring to show Hopestill how detestable his predecessor was by forcing the man upon her, much in the way some mothers allow their children to eat their way into an indifference for candy? And was this newly announced pregnancy part of Philip’s plan to tame the wild creature who had lived amongst wolves so long that she had come to howl like them?