fragrant shrubs. Before them stretched out an immense sward of velvet lawn, darkened by the grand and silent stature of great trees. The car swept forward; through the tree-barred vista of the lawn, the outline of a house appeared. It was a dream-house, a house such as one sees only in a dream—the moonlight slept upon its soaring wings, its white purity, and gave the whole enormous structure an aerial delicacy, a fragile loveliness like some enchanted structure that one sees in dreams. And yet, for all this quality of dream-enchantment, there was something hauntingly familiar about it too. The car swept around the drive and halted before the moonlit façade of the house. A back porch level with the ground was flanked by tall, square columns of graceful, slender wood. To one side, far below, beyond the house, and the great moon-sweep of velvet, he could see the wink and glimmer of the Hudson River.
And suddenly that haunting sense of familiarity fused to a blind flash of recognition. The house was the house he had passed a dozen times in darkness, had seen a dozen times at morning from the windows of a speeding train along the river, as he hurtled citywards again from those blind night passages of desire and fury in a town called Troy.
They got out of the car. Joel took his valise, and like a person walking in a dream, he followed him across the porch, into a large and dimly lit entrance-hall. Joel put his valise down in the hall, and turning, whispered:
“Look. I’ll show you your room later. Mums and some other people are waiting for us on the terrace. Let’s go and say hello to them first.”
He nodded, unable to speak, and in silence followed his guide down the hall and through the house. Joel opened a door: the blazing moonlight fell upon the vast, swarded lawn and sleeping woods of that magic domain known as Far Field Farm. And that haunting and unearthly radiance fell as well upon the white wings of that magic house and on a group of its fortunate inhabitants who were sitting on the terrace.
The two young men went out: forms rose to greet them.
LX
A group of eight or ten people were gathered on the terrace. Joel introduced Eugene swiftly, quietly, in an eager, whispering voice, as always, with his fine, kind intuition, mindful of another person’s embarrassment and confusion: the moonlit
