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maidens.
‘There’s a lot of business,’ said Baby. ‘First place, there’s
news from home—the property we used to call the station
property. The railroads only bought the centre of it at first.
Now they’ve bought the rest, and it belonged to Mother. It’s
a question of investing the money.’
Pretending to be repelled by this gross turn in the con-
versation, the Englishman made for a girl on the floor.
Following him for an instant with the uncertain eyes of an
American girl in the grip of a life-long Anglophilia, Baby
continued defiantly:
‘It’s a lot of money. It’s three hundred thousand apiece.
I keep an eye on my own investments but Nicole doesn’t
know anything about securities, and I don’t suppose you do
either.’
‘I’ve got to meet the train,’ Dick said evasively.
Outside he inhaled damp snowflakes that he could no
longer see against the darkening sky. Three children sled-
ding past shouted a warning in some strange language; he
heard them yell at the next bend and a little farther on he
heard sleigh-bells coming up the hill in the dark. The holiday
station glittered with expectancy, boys and girls waiting for
new boys and girls, and by the time the train arrived, Dick
had caught the rhythm, and pretended to Franz Gregorovi-
us that he was clipping off a half-hour from an endless roll
of pleasures. But Franz had some intensity of purpose at the
moment that fought through any superimposition of mood
on Dick’s part. ‘I may get up to Zurich for a day,’ Dick had
written, ‘or you can manage to come to Lausanne.’ Franz

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