Billie found the damage at once. “Clifford, honestly!” She faced the Grandins with a gasp of exasperation, her hands on her hips. “Isn’t it the limit, he’s always breaking things! Everything he touches or handles gets broken before he’s through with it. Like that chair yesterday. And then he borrowed my father’s car the other night, a big heavy Buick mind you—”

“Well gee, Billie, I didn’t do it on purpose, did I? It’s just an old light bulb,” he added.

“Light bulb nothing—look at that dressing table, Clifford Hauman!” Then, as if suddenly remembering that this was the first time her professor was seeing her in a bathing suit, she assumed her sleepy smile and sauntered across the room to admire a calendar.

She wore an ultrafeminine bathing dress of white satin lastex with a short pleated skirt and bare midriff. It had probably been made especially for her by a dressmaker and, as Billie well knew, it strikingly set off her figure and beauty. In the crude phrase, she was built for comfort, the comfort of a man. He could see how it would be delightful and exciting to go to bed with her, but only if she were interested in him as well—or, better, if she were someone he had never met.

Ethel wore espadrilles, a black woolen bathing suit (it fitted her tight, without ruffle or frill, and made her figure look straight and firm, almost hipless, like a girl in her teens), and a long yellow peignoir of toweling which they had bought in Paris seven or eight years ago. For her cigarettes, comb, sun-­tan oil and other trifles needed at the beach, she carried the rubber-­lined canvas bag they had used to carry diapers in when Alan was a baby.

“Mrs. Grandin,” Hauman said, “I’m going to call you Ethel if you don’t mind. Do you mind?”

“I wish you would, Cliff.”

He felt better. Now they were all friends. Assured that this was so, he took Grandin’s arm. “Okay, John, let’s go.”

In the hall Billie could be heard confiding some news to Ethel which, from the intensity of her usually languid voice, should have been exciting. “Do you know what we heard at the diner in Nantucket? We heard that Toni Lansing was here in Sconset! Wouldn’t it be thrilling to run into her?”

“Who’s Tony Lansing?” Grandin asked.

“Imagine, Mrs. Grandin,” Billie said, “ ‘who’s Toni Lansing’! Aren’t men the limit?”

Hauman rose to his defense. “Well, I didn’t know myself,” he said. “It seems she’s some movie star. Billie knows them all. You’d think from the name it was a man. But boy”—he gave a short laugh and lowered his voice—“I saw her in a movie once and Toni Lansing’s no man.”