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made of welded car grilles and bumpers, and “Little Eyes,” a board studded with pairs of dolls’ eyeballs, and down an avenue of stamped crates and plumbing fixtures, before I found it. “… perfectly legitimate,” Austin was saying, quoting Apollinaire, “to use numbers and printed letters as pictorial elements… soaked with humanity…” I passed by “Arteriosclerosis”: forks and spoons in a glass-covered box. I turned through an avenue of life-sized cloth figures, and there was Austin’s psyche, plain as could be, all among the big hoardings that showed us Op Art.
    Op art was just black lines on white: whorls and spirals and fine jagged mesh that did something to the backs of your eyeballs and sent your optical nerves into a frenzy. Or it took the form of fifteen-foot circles of plywood, spiralled in thin bandings of shocking pink, lime green, and orange. Janey stood before one of those with her eyes under the contact lenses so dilated that I thought she was going to faint, and Austin asked her if she was all right.
    “Frankly,” said Janey, “I think it’s procuring.”
    “Now, this interests me,” Austin said. “I consider that this art shows a person his innermost being. Great art is a catharsis.”
    “All I can say is,” said Janey, “if I had that in my bedroom, I’d need Dutch caps for my eyeballs. She-she, we’re going to be late.”
    He saw us into the Maserati, holding Janey’s hand, and then mine. “You’re coming to dinner,” said Janey. “I’ll ring you. Who was the boy who did all the quilting?”
    Austin told her. He was, as I remember, a male nurse in a Sun Valley health farm.
    It had been a tough match. My opinion is, Austin won.
     
    The fish was a howling success. I helped Anne-Marie serve it, and Janey’s father introduced me to all his guests—two silent Spaniards and four pasty, rectangular gentlemen with hearty smiles and uncertain English. One of the latter group was the commercial attaché at the Russian Embassy in Madrid, and the three others were straight from Moscow on a trade fair excursion. The attaché, whose Spanish was fluent, finally lapsed into that language and interpreted for the other three. It was a dead groovy lunch, I can tell you.
    Janey sat at the head of the table, speaking Spanish as well and looking quite elegant. I suppose she’s been her father’s hostess half her life: her mother died before I even knew her, and her father seems to have gone on just as if nothing had happened, only assuming Janey would carry on in her place. She’s been away a lot, of course, but on every return home she seems to have taken control. She has a good brain. And of course she’s had Anne-Marie and Helmuth, and any other help that she wanted.
    After lunch I served coffee and cognac, and Mr. Lloyd asked me to stay and have it with Janey. He and the six visitors left almost immediately to talk in his smoking room.
    Gilmore hadn’t come in. “He’s at Coco’s,” said Janey. She had had two cognacs and hadn’t even turned pink. “They’ve got a living-in tennis professional, and Giller is either going to make Wimbledon or spring a coil in his chesterfield.”
    “Isn’t he keen on the business?” I said. A playboy-sportsman is all right. A middle-aged playboy-sportsman is slightly pathetic, especially to a middle-aged playboy-sportsman’s wife.
    “You’re joking,” said Janey dispassionately. “He took a law degree because Daddy wouldn’t give him an allowance without it; and he went to Harvard because he was dead keen on baseball and rich American girls’ legs. He’s got the allowance and had the American girls, so why work?”
    I cleared up, and lifted an English newspaper three days old off the hall table on my way up to the siesta. It promised Scorpio a good day and Virgo a slight disappointment. Clem Sainsbury was the same as me, Capricorn. Capricorn, said the paper, should treat foreign interests and matters of law with extreme caution, for