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forgotten, she supposed, that she had used it earlier.
    “No one ever reached the climax of vice at one step,” said Charlie, with satisfaction. “Juvenal. I found it in a book of quotations. I thought at the time it might come in handy some day.”
    “They’re just taking a walk.”
    “I can’t tell you how many walks I’ve taken in my time that ended exactly the way I wanted them to. Of course now I have to walk a little longer. But still….”
    “Charlie, really.”
    “Really what? If you pose as a Don Juan, everybody’s down on you. But if you pose as an unsuccessful Don Juan, everyoneenvies the effort and sympathizes with the failure. That gives you more freedom.”
    For a moment she was startled. It sounded so much like her own reasons for these little public games.
    Charlie stared at the startlets in the pool. Apparently he still felt benign. “You know, when they bail a few more of the guppies out, I think I’ll go in,” he said. “I haven’t gone for a swim this year.”
    But when the guppies were bailed out, he didn’t go. He looked a little lonely.

XIV
    ALONG the road, about fifty feet from the pool, two horse-faced people in riding habits, black coats, fawn breeches immaculately cut, and very expensive boots, pedaled by on bicycles. To ride is essential. To run the car at unnecessary, which is to say private, moments is merely expensive. Luxembourg is like that.
    “Where have they got to now?” asked Charlie.
    “Who?”
    “Paul.”
    “I think he’s telling her about his childhood, from the look of them.”
    “Nonsense. I know all about that. He didn’t have one.” He looked at his discarded lemon.
    “It is hard to remember, isn’t it?” he said.
    “What?”
    “What one was like.”
    “I never try.”
    He took that in good part. “They’ve got a funny film at five,” he said. “Come along and see it and let’s leave them here.” Apart from being a judge, he was also an inveterate, though not incessant, movie-goer. He even watched the documentaries. Boning up on scenery, he called it.

XV
    DOCUMENTARIES were scheduled in the late afternoon, on the theory that anyone who goes to documentaries wouldn’t be helped much by a drink at seven anyway. First on the program was an American short, badly transcribed from a video tape, of William Faulkner, looking rather like Tom Thumb, talking to a Negro. Both the Negro and William Faulkner seemed mad as hops, which, considering the photography, was understandable enough. This was followed by a color film in which some Javanese threw a goat into a volcano. It meant something ethnically, and fortunately the volcano had been extinct at the time, though it was a pity about the goat. This, in turn, gave way to something abstract from Canada, to prove that the twentieth century had reached the 49th parallel, and now the Canadians were sending it back. Then the feature came on.
    “Ah,” said Charlie.
    It was a French scissors-and-paste job called The Golden Years . It began well with a glimpse of Sarah Bernhardt, looking battered but immortal at the funeral of a friend, carried in a litter, with a rug over her knees. She may not have beenan actress exactly, but she had been able to have quite a long audience with the world, all the same.
    There had been nothing particularly feminine about the Divine Sarah, who at seventy still looked like a boy cardinal. About the world’s great enchanters there seldom is. There is always something subtly androgynous about them.
    Lotte found herself watching with absorbed dismay. If I had been born a hundred years ago, I suppose I should have been her, she thought, though she always wanted to become the Divine Sarah, and I became the Divine Lotte merely by accident. The Divine Sarah looks maternal, and wasn’t one scrap. Whereas I don’t, and am always worrying about my secret chickens, hatched or not.
    There were other differences. Once Sarah discovered Sardou wrote perfect parts, she marched him off and