He seemed about to continue, but then Clark Notson joined them. Clark did not, Pam thought, look like a man who was having a particularly good time. “Supposed to get Miss Hartley her ginger ale,” he said. He spoke rather hurriedly.

Jerry, who was nearest the bar, said, “Here,” and reached for the innocent bottle—a bottle, Pam thought, which looked a little smug and virtuous among the other bottles. Jerry used a silver opener, snapped off the bottle cap. The cap bounced off, tinkled against a bottle.

“Don’t know your own strength,” Clark said, and took the bottle and, with it, a glass into which Jerry dropped ice. “Never drinks anything stronger, the lady doesn’t,” Clark said, and bore away the bottle.

“And doesn’t need to,” Hortense Notson said, and drifted away. She could drift immaculately.

“She buys dresses,” Pam said. “Wouldn’t you know?”

“As distinct—?” Jerry said, and was told he knew perfectly well what Pam meant.

“Buys them for, not from,” Pam said.

To this, Jerry simply said, “Oh.”

It was then a little after eight, and there was a restless circulation in the long room. Pam was with Phyllis Pitt. Phyllis assured her that food would arrive soon. And hadn’t old times come flooding back?

“Mm,” Pam said. Pam was then with Clark Notson and, with him, talked unexpectedly of tooth paste. One never knows what will come up at a party. It appeared that Clark’s firm made tooth paste. Stanley Pitt joined them. He said Clark had quite an operation there. Pam left them and drifted, dutifully, back to Fern, who sipped ginger ale. Fern’s eyes were very bright. They seemed almost to glitter.

(But that’s absurd, Pam thought. People’s don’t, only cats’.)

“It’s so exciting,” Fern said, and looked around the room, presumably at “it.” “To meet you all again, and your nice husbands and—” She paused. “Only,” she said, “I keep wondering. . .”

Pam waited. She said, “What, Fern?”

“Oh,” Fern said. “Nothing dear. Nothing really. Do you remember—”

Pam did not. She listened for a time, and was relieved by Hortense, and drifted on again. For a minute or two, then, Pam North was alone and stood looking up and down the softly lighted room. Beyond the windows at the far end, lights glowed up from the garden below. The room was filled, but not harshly, with conversation—there seemed, somehow, to be more than the seven of them in it. Probably, Pam thought, memories crowded it—the red-haired girl, the stuttering boy.