Toward the end of the second album the photography burst into color to celebrate the vivid vestiture of her adolescent molts. She appeared in floral frocks, fancy slacks, tennis shorts, swimsuits, amidst the harsh greens and blues of the commercial spectrum. He discovered the elegant angularity of her sun-tanned shoulders, the long line of her haunch. He learned that at eighteen the torrent of her pale hair reached the small of her back. No matrimonial agency could have offered its clients such variations on the theme of one virgin. In the third album he found, with an enjoyable sense of homecoming, glimpses of his immediate surroundings: the lemon and black cushions of the divan at the other end of the room and the Denton mount of a bird-wing butterfly on the mantelpiece. The fourth, incomplete album began with a sparkle of her chastest images: Armande in a pink parka, Armande jewel-bright, Armande careening on skis through the sugar dust.

At last, from the upper part of the transparent house, Madame Chamar warily trudged downstairs, the jelly of a bare forearm wobbling as she clutched at the balustrade rail. She was now clad in an elaborate summer dress with flounces, as if she too, like her daughter, had been passing through several stages of change. "Don't get up, don't get up," she cried, patting the air with one hand, but Hugh insisted he'd better go. "Tell her," he added, "tell your daughter when she returns from her glacier, that I was extremely disappointed. Tell her I shall be staying a week, two weeks, three weeks here, at the grim Ascot Hotel in the pitiful village of Witt. Tell her I shall telephone if she does not. Tell her," he continued, now walking down a slippery path among cranes and power shovels immobilized in the gold of the late afternoon, "tell her that my system is poisoned by her, by her twenty sisters, her twenty dwindlings in backcast, and that I shall perish if I cannot have her."

He was still rather simple as lovers go. One might have said to fat, vulgar Madame Chamar: how dare you exhibit your child to sensitive strangers? But our Person vaguely imagined that this was a case of modern immodesty current in Madame Chamar's set. What "set," good Lord? The lady's mother had been a country veterinary's daughter, same as Hugh's mother (by the only coincidence worth noting in the whole rather sad affair). Take those pictures away, you stupid nudist!

She rang him up around midnight, waking him in the pit of an evanescent, but definitely bad, dream (after all that melted cheese and young potatoes with a bottle of green wine at the hotel's carnotzet). As he scrabbled up the receiver, he groped with the other hand for his reading glasses, without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he could not attend to the telephone properly. "You Person?" asked her voice.

He already knew, ever since she had recited the contents of the card he had given her on the train, that she pronounced his first name as "You."

"Yes, it's me, I mean 'you,' I mean you mispronounce it most enchantingly."

"I do not mispronounce anything. Look, I never received – "

"Oh, you do! You drop your haitches like – like pearls into a blindman's cup."

"Well, the correct pronunciation is 'cap.' I win. Now listen, tomorrow I'm occupied, but what about Friday – if you can be ready А sept heures precises?"

He certainly could.

She invited "Percy," as she declared she would call him from now on, since he detested "Hugh," to come with her for a bit of summer skiing at Drakonita, or Darkened Heat, as he misheard it, which caused him to conjure up a dense forest protecting romantic ramblers from the blue blaze of an alpine noon. He said he had never learned to ski on a holiday at Sugarwood, Vermont, but would be happy to stroll beside her, along a footpath not only provided for him by fancy but also swept clean with a snowman's broom – one of those instant unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man.

13

Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It teems with transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink with an angel's or author's delight, but we have to single out for this report only one Person. Not an extensive hiker, he limited his loafing to a tedious survey of the village. A grim stream of cars rolled and rolled, some seeking with the unwieldy wariness of reluctant machinery a place to park, others coming from, or heading for, the much more fashionable resort of Thur, twenty miles north. He passed several times by the old fountain dribbling through the geranium-lined trough of a hollowed log; he examined the post office and the bank, the church and the tourist agency, and a famous black hovel that was still allowed to survive with its cabbage patch and scarecrow crucifix between a boarding-house and a laundry.

He drank beer in two different taverns. He lingered before a sports shop; relingered – and bought a nice gray turtleneck sweater with a tiny and very pretty American flag embroidered over the heart. "Made in Turkey," whispered its label. He decided it was time for some more refreshments – and saw her sitting at a sidewalk cafe. You swerved toward her, thinking she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on the opposite chair. Simultaneously her companion came out of the tea shop and, resuming her seat, said in that lovely New York voice, with that harlot dash he would have recognized even in heaven:

"The john is a joke."

Meanwhile Hugh Person, unable to shed the mask of an affable grin, had come up and was invited to join them.

An adjacent customer, comically resembling Person's late Aunt Melissa whom we like very much, was reading l'Erald Tribune. Armande believed (in the vulgar connotation of the word) that Julia Moore had met Percy. Julia believed she had. So did Hugh, indeed, yes. Did his aunt's double permit him to borrow her spare chair? He was welcome to it. She was a dear soul, with five cats, living in a toy house, at the end of a birch avenue, in the quietest part of -

Interrupting us with an earsplitting crash an impassive waitress, a poor woman in her own right, dropped a tray with lemonades and cakes, and crouched, splitting into many small quick gestures peculiar to that woman, her face impassive.

Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to "impress" her Russian friends. Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.

"My former stepfather, thank Heavens," said Julia. "By the way, Percy, if that's your nom de voyage, perhaps you may help. As she explained, I want to dazzle some people in Moscow, who promised me the company of a famous young Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a number of darling words, but we got stuck at – " (taking a slip of paper from her bag) – "I want to know how to say:

'What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.' You see we do it first into French and she thinks 'snowdrift' is rafale de neige, but I'm sure it can't be rafale in French and rafalovich in Russian, or whatever they call a snowstorm."

"The word you want," said our Person, "is congИre, feminine gender, I learned it from my mother."

"Then it's sugrob in Russian," said Armande and added dryly: "Only there won't be much snow there in August."

Julia laughed. Julia looked happy and healthy. Julia had grown even prettier than she had been two years ago. Shall I now see her in dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long hair? How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions? Will the next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?

"Let me order something for you," said Armande to Percy, not making, however, the offering gesture that usually goes with that phrase.