“We’ll have a fire,” Damon said after dinner, as they went back into the drawing room. “I’ll just light it for you,” he said as Julia brought in coffee. Isabel, noting the three cups on the tray, realized with amusement that here in Cambridge the gentlemen would stay on in the dining room for their brandy while the ladies retired. She had felt all evening like a total stranger in a noisy and passionate world. Especially Grace Kimlock—was that her name?—sitting now as straight as a ramrod on the little sofa by the fire, terrified her. She indeed had the hawk’s eyes which Isabel had imagined. In this pause while Julia carried out the cocktail glasses, while Damon lit the Cape Cod lighter and set it under the logs, she felt those eyes upon her. To escape she got up and wandered over to look at a portrait of Damon as a boy hanging over the model of a clipper ship in a glass case which needed dusting. Damon was dressed in a white sailor suit with a whistle round his shoulder on a blue cord, and he was looking straight out, a thin fair-haired boy with very bright eyes. The portrait shone out in the great shabby room as the one thing young and untouched by time, for the dark red curtains at the windows had faded and looked dusty too, and the Persian carpet had taken on a soft pinkish glow. Yet how comfortable the Victorian chairs were, she thought, and how safe one felt here. It had been like this, she felt, for such a long time, had been Damon’s father’s house before it became his, she had been told. This, in itself, this continuity in one house so unusual in America, filled her with peace. When Grace Kimlock spoke, Isabel had forgotten her.

“I wonder how they ever got Damon to sit still long enough for that portrait,” the clear sharp voice broke in. And then, as Isabel turned to answer, she pounced. “You’re not a bit like Edward,” she said, challenging, “are you?”

Isabel was saved by Julia who came back, providentially, just then. Isabel admired Julia; she moved among them, these passionate, voluble people so calmly and slowly, with such control. And now she turned to Grace and said severely, “Grace, be good. Do you take cream and sugar?”

“Black, please. And why should I be good? We have very little time and ‘being good,’ which I take it means being discreet and saying nothing real, takes too much time.”

“Families are such queer things,” Isabel said, half in answer, but she was also still under the spell of the room, its peace.