There was clapping — Sally looked with trepidation up at her mother — and a figure in a clown costume burst from the swinging pantry doors. Some faces regarded him warily, others were enraptured. Sam, the youngest Sedgwick, recognizing the clown from his storybook, ran forward and clasped him around the leg in a desperate hug.

Marian got him for only sixty dollars, Dolly Vernon whispered. She was dressed in a belted tunic with Turkish trim, a new fashion.

Lilian saw with astonishment that she was serious.

The children love him, said Dolly.

I remember when five candles and a blow whistle were sufficient for a birthday party.

Oh, Lilian Eliot, so old-fashioned. Dolly Vernon held her elbow cupped in one hand, a cigarette up like a flag in the other. Stop that, Tommy, she called across the room. Let Fay have a turn.

Jane Ives appeared in the door with her stout John and wistful Emily who was as pale and thin as her brother was round and ruddy. Emily, coat removed, ventured forward as far as the frightened children, bumping against Sally Finch. They stared at each other’s smocking, stepping from one foot to the other.

The ladies sidled off to the library, keeping an eye on the proceedings through the double doorway.

We go to Venice next month, Madelaine Fenwick Wigglesworth was saying when Lilian walked in. Harry has a conference. Madelaine Fenwick had married the curator Henry Wigglesworth after his wife died, inheriting five stepchildren and adopting the look of a sophisticated fifty-year-old.

Are you staying at the Gritti? said Marian Wiggin, rushing by.

No, we’re sponging off the Vails, she said.

Is that Walter Vail? said Dolly Vernon with interest. Ever since their encounter in Shepard’s Market, Dolly Vernon had appropriated Walter Vail as part of her property, forgetting for the most part that he’d had anything to do with Lilian Finch, that having been so long ago. Relations were important to Dolly Vernon, but in terms of her immediate experience of the person.

No, said Madelaine Wigglesworth. His parents have a palazzo. Now that she was married to a man twenty years her senior, it was quite natural for her to be going about with the older generation.

Walter Vail. Lilian could almost laugh at the thought. More and more she found she measured her life by how far away she felt from things. Walter Vail seemed the other side of the moon.

The sound of a cranked music box came from the living room. The clown had gotten everyone to sit cross-legged on the floor, each small head tilted back, and was spinning a lamp with cut-outs, making bits of light shaped like horses and birds go around the walls.

Do you know where Walter Vail is now? Lilian said. She cleared her throat at the dryness in the name.