ly introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her
history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter,
Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory
imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to
America, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to stay
with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at
the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the
country in March, having quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore
relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd
had come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously
condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an
esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents
still redolent of St. Timothy's and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian
naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of
a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged,
subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather
who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as far
as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his
mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the
sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly
think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there
on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move
over--sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more,
before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even
progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging
and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes--two years of
sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind
had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with
Eleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever
spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of
his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of
his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.

Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together.
For months it seemed that he