niece loaned Jenny hers, and in this borrowed suit which fit her a shade too well, Jenny clung to the gunwale of the tender, clutching Pete’s hand and floating her pink-and-white face like a toy balloon unwetted above the water, while Pete sat in the boat fully dressed even to his hat, glowering.
Mr. Talliaferro’s bathing suit was red, giving him a bizarre desiccated look, like a recently extracted tooth. He wore also a red rubber cap and he let himself gingerly into the water feet first from the stern of the tender, and here he clung beside the placid Jenny, trying to engage her in small talk beneath Pete’s thunderous regard. The ghostly poet in his ironed serge—he didn’t swim—lay again at full length on four chairs, craning his pale prehensile face above the bathers.
Fairchild looked more like a walrus than ever: a deceptively sedate walrus of middle age suddenly evincing a streak of demoniac puerility. He wallowed and splashed, heavily playful, and, seconded by Major Ayers, annoyed the ladies by pinching them under water and by splashing them, wetting Pete liberally where he sat smoldering with Jenny clinging to his hand and squealing, trying to protect her make-up. The Semitic man paddled around with that rather ludicrous intentness of a fat man swimming. Gordon sat on the rail, looking on. Fairchild and Major Ayers at last succeeded in driving the ladies back into the tender, about which they splashed and yapped with the tactless playfulness of dogs while Pete refraining “Look out goddam you look out christ watcher doing lookout” struck at their fingers with one of his discarded and sopping shoes.
Above this one-sided merriment the niece appeared poised upon the top of the wheelhouse, unseen by those in the water. They were aware first of a white arrow arcing down the sky. The water took it lazily and while they stared at the slow green vortex where it had entered there was a commotion be-
