The cocktails, the caviar, the steak, the champagne—an hour—two hours had gone by. The company was relaxed now, and without rancor. The orchestra that had been playing what is known as dinner music now broke its tempo into fragments suited to dancing. Bay, who had regarded the musicians with an eye remote to the point of obliteration, now asked Chris to dance. This rather surprised her, she rose with alacrity, whisked to the tiny dance floor, his arm came round her. She said, “I’ve been simply dying to dance, I haven’t had a—–”

Bay said, “Sh-sh-sh-sh.” They danced the remainder of the number in silence and returned to the table.

Dave sat back, replete, and belched delicately with a napkin to his face. He glanced around expansively, he caught the eye of an acquaintance across the room and greeted him with an open jerk of the hand. He looked across the table at Dina, so silent, so contained. He frowned as though suddenly crossed in the midst of satisfaction. His eyes rested on Christine’s flushed happy face.

“Well, Miss Chrissy, you haven’t told me what you think of the ship.”

“I think it’s horrible.”

His start was almost a jerk, like that of a bad actor in a play. “Say, wait a minute!”

Czar looked at her keenly. He often had seen that expression in her eyes when she began what he called one of her Thor speeches. “Now Christine,” he said, gently, warningly.

“I guess you don’t like fish, Chrissy girl,” Dave said. “That it?”

“It was like seeing a race horse hitched to a garbage wagon.”

Very leisurely, Czar seemed to hum rather than actually speak. “I don’t recollect that you’ve ever actually seen a horse, Christine.”

Dave leaned forward, his enormous hands gripped together on the table. He had shoved his plate away abruptly so that the knife fell off and spattered the white cloth. “Listen here. An old race horse hitched to a garbage wagon is doing something useful. He’s hauling garbage that has to be hauled—or anyway used to have to be, before trucks and incinerators. What did he do before! He just ran. I like a good race as well as the next fella, but what’s a race horse good for, when you come right down to it? What did he do? He just ran.”

Chris felt helpless and rather foolish, but, somehow, in the right. “He was beautiful. I’ve never seen a race horse, but I know they’re beautiful, especially when they’re running. And they do too prove something. Anything or anyone that can do something better or more beautifully than another is valuable. Just by existing and making people feel the way they do when they do it, they’re valuable.” She was growing somewhat incoherent, but she persisted, earnestly. “Like a painting. A piece of music. A poem. A race horse. It has nothing to do with everyday usefulness. It—it’s beauty.”

Czar was deeply annoyed with her. But he laughed now, a short laugh, but tolerant-seeming, as he glanced around at the others. “Don’t let her get your goat, Dave. That’s what I call her Thor talk. He’s a great one, Thor is, for this beauty stuff and so on. Not that I don’t like beautiful things myself, but if you don’t mind I’d like to take this minute to clear this with Christine, here, seeing that I’m leaving tomorrow, and all. Now then, this ship was beautiful, the finest of its kind in the world, I guess, in her day. And one of the richest men in the world went all over the world in it, with beautiful women and, from what I’ve heard, handsome successful men. Actresses and so on. Place called the Rivera, up and down the Mediterranean Sea. What good was that! Millions of dollars for the pleasuring of a handful of foolish men and women.”