“Beat it, Byron!” said one of the women sharply. It was only when the dog rose, his head hanging in dog apology, and left the dining room that Annie realized the woman had been addressing him.

“I’m surrounded by hostile women and a child unduly influenced by them. Now, I’m presented with this boring cake, sugared to death. Let’s get out of here,” said the man, and twitched the napkin from his head. “No coffee!” he shouted at the closed kitchen door.

James St. Vincent’s head was long, his face narrow. Gray hair, streaked with black, purled over his skull. His was a faintly simian face; the long narrow eyes moved restlessly. The face conveyed impatience and yet uncertainty, as though a child’s bewilderment at the strangeness of life had remained unmodified, unanswered, by all the data accumulated by those clever eyes.

The woman next to him said, “But I want coffee, and Grace wants coffee, and—who knows? Andrew may want coffee!” The boy shook his head mutely and continued to stuff pieces of cake into his mouth with little pointed fingers. He looked fourteen or fifteen but seemed even younger.

James St. Vincent rose, dropping the napkin on the table, and walked over to Annie to take her arm. “Upstairs!” he whispered.

He led her to a bedroom where intimations of feminine fussing remained like a faint echo among the disordered papers on the floor and table, pencils on window sills, a typewriter lopsided on the silk-upholstered seat of an armchair, a man’s raincoat in a heap in a corner. There was a telephone on a pillow, its black wire curling over the beige satin cover.

“Well, pal! What the hell are you doing out here?” He sat down, then reclined fully on one of the two beds. His gray sweater was full of small holes. She noticed his hands were like the boy’s, pointed, catlike, vaguely repellent. The dog appeared in the doorway. “Poor Byron. Come in, lad,” St. Vincent said to the dog, who at once jumped up on the unoccupied bed and groaned himself into a mound of white and brown fur. Annie moved the typewriter to the floor and sat down.

“A lady was driving out from New York. I came along,” she replied, knowing that it was no answer.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

An equally unanswerable question. “Well, I don’t really know,” she said. “I guess I move around too much,” she added smiling, searching around in her mind for something to distract him from herself. “My father says you used to write plays…”

Jim held up his hands as though she’d held a pistol to him.