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‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’ He lowered the megaphone and then raised it stub-
bornly. ‘I’m going to invite some more people too. I’m going
to invite the two young men.’
‘All right,’ she agreed placidly.
‘I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to
give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people
going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out
in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.’
He went back into his house and Nicole saw that one
of his most characteristic moods was upon him, the ex-
citement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably
followed by his own form of melancholy, which he never
displayed but at which she guessed. This excitement about
things reached an intensity out of proportion to their im-
portance, generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with
people. Save among a few of the tough-minded and peren-
nially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated
and uncritical love. The reaction came when he realized the
waste and extravagance involved. He sometimes looked
back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a
general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to sat-
isfy an impersonal blood lust.
But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a
remarkable experience: people believed he made special res-
ervations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of
their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many
years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consider-
ation and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that

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