But Mr. Morgan had already risen to perform. He moved unsteadily across the room and stood before the Governor Winthrop and in a moment began to sing. Above his strange head, like a moon at half eclipse, Miss Pride’s father stared at the trophy case. His loosely clenched hand rested on a table at his side as if he were about to make it into a fist and pound. The wavering Long Islander sang with a tuneless, distended insolence, rolling his eyes and suddenly closing them as, stopping dead in his song, he stroked imaginary female hips of extraordinary dimensions. The Babbitts, half in tears with laughter, kept filling his glass with straight whiskey, for at the end of each line, by way of punctuation, he drained off what he had. The lewdness came chiefly from his pantomime and his catarrhal voice, for the words that issued from his boneless face were only:

I love to go swimmin’

With bow-legged women

And dive between their legs.

“Isn’t he a scream?” shrieked Mrs. Babbitt.

Frank Whitney was pale. “Let’s get him out, McAllister. He’s drunk as a catfish.” He started towards the offender, but Hopestill, who without trying to stop the song, had been gazing up at her grandfather as if supplicating him either to forgive this indignity or to put a stop to it, raised her hand in an apostolic gesture which said, “He has asylum here.”

“He’s perfectly all right, Frank,” she said. “He’s only gay. He inherited two million dollars yesterday and he has every right to sing if he wants to.”

“Repeat refrain!” cried Mr. Babbitt, covering his face with his hands while his thorax hopped convulsively like a jumping bean. Mr. Morgan obliged him and the words traveled slowly through his nose.

The door to the library flung open and crashed against the paneling. Miss Pride, dressed for dinner in garnets and black silk, stood on the threshold appraising the terrain. The first to speak was Harry Morgan who, going towards her with the sober countenance that appears in certain stages of drunkenness, said, “Mrs. Mather, I presume?” Miss Pride’s enameled lenses suddenly could focus only on distant objects. She looked at me and said, “The letters, Sonie, which you promised to mail,” and held them out. Mr. Morgan’s rejected paw faltered uncertainly to his side.

“Good evening, Helen.” She addressed Mrs. Babbitt frigidly.