In the limpid pool, a starlet swam alone. Her auburn hair was neatly tucked beneath a light blue cap, and her delicate arms parted the water’s dappled surface without a sound. She was this fair city’s newest nightingale. At the four corners of the pool stood cabana boys, each hoping that when she concluded her fiftieth lap she would climb from the water in his proximity so that he would have the honor of bestowing upon her a towel. Not ten years before, when this damsel (or rather, her predecessor) had finished her calisthenics, it would have been toward Prentice that she swam. Calling out some coy remark, she would have splashed him playfully from the pool’s edge before backstroking into fame’s embrace.

Alas, there is no fixing of man’s position in the system of the heavens, anymore than one can fix the position of a skiff at sea. Alas, yes, alas; but also, avanti!

—Afternoon, Mr. Symmons, said the boy at north northwest. It was James, the arch one. Afternoon, he said without a modifier while betraying the slightest smile, as if winking at some shared acknowledgment of Prentice’s professional standing. It was a harbinger, no doubt, of the cad’s inevitable successes as a talent agent, or felon.

—Good afternoon, Prentice corrected as he passed.

At the edge of the terrace awaited the twenty-six steps to the main floor. They knew as well as he that not a hundred feet away an elevator had lately been installed. But he had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of using it. He brandished his cane once and launched his ascent. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. It is a good afternoon, he remarked to himself as he crested the top. His daily exercise had been completed, the insolence of the cabana boy parried, the twenty-six steps bested, and it was only half past three.

Back inside the hotel proper, he smiled when he passed the elegantly scripted sign that pointed the way to the lobby. To refer to that space as a lobby was to commit a crime of nomenclature. In such a room, did Kubla Khan hold court. It was a geographic pinpoint through which within the hour the world would come and go. Misguided financiers newly arrived from Manhattan with a single change of clothes would soon be signing the registry. Delivery boys would be appearing in the nick of time with indistinguishably altered dresses, or with flower arrangements composed like Elizabethan sonnets to express admiration or regret. And the town’s young Turks on their way to the bar would pass the late-lunching Titans they aspired to supplant.