The more ordinary-looking book on the grass underneath his chair said The Plastic Age, by someone named Marks. “I presume that's a novel?” I asked.

“You bet,” he said. “Everyone's talking about it—nearly got itself banned for the hot bits. The story of a fellow's undergraduate years. What about you?”

“A book on feng shui. It's a kind of Chinese philosophy.” I saw their faces go blank, and thought I should perhaps redeem myself a little. “I did read a book on the boat out that had been banned for years. Have you read Jurgen?”

They'd heard of it, wanted to know how “hot” it was, but I had to admit that the moral outrage of the censors probably had less to do with the petting scenes than with the fact that it was gods who were doing the petting. Donny trumped my bid of Jurgen by saying casually that he'd met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I'd found Fitzgerald's stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness—and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that—I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky.

We ate lunch, and then Donny wanted to try the canoes. Flo protested that the sun was too hot, but he offered her one of his long shirts, and that (along with a wide straw hat from the house) mollified her. They paddled, they swam, I joined them and sat out, and then it was somehow evening, and the happy melancholy of physical repletion coupled with too much sun settled over us. We had a drink, and dinner, and played billiards in the front room until the worst of the mosquitoes had been driven off by the citronella.

Around ten o'clock Donny proposed another swim. Flo and I begged off, but he was set on it, and strode down the lawn into the darkness. After a minute, we heard a splash, then the rhythmic sounds of arm strokes.

“Do you suppose he went in fully dressed?” I asked Flo. He was by no means drunk, so I wasn't worried about his safety, but I was curious.

“No, there'll be a line of clothing down the lawn come morning,” she told me.

The sound of his strokes faded and grew dim, then nonexistent. “He seems a strong swimmer,” I said dubiously.

“Gosh, you don't need to worry about Donny—for two bits he'd swim across the Golden Gate. You'd never know he had scarlet fever when he was a kid, would you?”

“It doesn't seem to have affected him.”

“It did, though. He tried to join up in '17, but they wouldn't have him. A dicky heart. That's when he came out here—he was too wild about it to stay at home where all his friends had joined up, had to get away. Bit sensitive about it, you know?”