“Ma’am,” he said, “how right you are!”

Now Dave Husack and Bayard his son, and Dina Drake, sat seething in the over-sized sports car, knee to knee to knee. The Husacks had stayed up on the Hill overlooking the bay and Puget Sound, that was the thing when he had built, years ago. Now the trend was toward Lake Washington or even out of the city altogether. Like the rest of the world’s communities large and small, traffic and planes and the oily fumes of new industries had marked even the Seattle hills for their own. Family after family moved to outlying districts, away from the throbbing cars zooming up the steep winding roads, around the curves, flashing their huge lights into your plate-glass windows. But Dave’s house had been his first substantial proof of stupendous financial success. It was a beloved symbol necessary to his self-sustenance. He had put mahogany into it. Brass. Silver. Even gold. It boasted a wine cellar, though Dave himself drank only bourbon. He liked to mark the growth of the trees that had been planted when the house was built, and that had so flourished that now they periodically had to be trimmed to avoid obstructing the view; the monkey trees, the birches, the madroñas. He liked to fancy that from these heights he could see the Pacific one hundred and twenty miles distant—an absurd notion. The place, inside and outside, was kept in the most exquisite order; of its ugly old-fashioned, comfortable and overstuffed kind, it was perfection. You could not imagine adding anything to it or taking anything away. It was as complete as Buckingham Palace, as the Taj Mahal, as Mount Rainier, as an anthill.

Louise Husack came toward them as the three entered the hallway that cut through the entire house, front to back, and that had the dimensions of an assembly room. Her face was alight and eager like that of a child or a lonely woman. She was full of news and disjointed conversation.

“Well, I didn’t know what had happened to you, ‘Milio’s down there probably waiting for you to come down, David, you’d better try to get word to him, he’ll just sit there at the curb all night if you don’t.… Dina did you order yellow roses I said pink they sent yellow you know I’m superstitious about yellow even if it does go with the gold epergné.… I want to show you something, David, you too, Bay, guess who’s coming here to school at Washington U. next autumn—Czar Kennedy’s granddaughter! Here’s his letter, he says she’d like a little apartment near the U., and would we kind of keep an eye on her, she’s just a young girl, I’d like to write him I’d just as soon she’d come and stay right here with us, all this room and it certainly would be lovely to have a young girl around the house. I think I remember her. Didn’t that Czar Kennedy leave her here with me one afternoon when he had a business conference? A little girl.”