Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her voice was limpid. Poor Paul. Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation." Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off." She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze. You see, I knew her. I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely. Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat. They ordered Manhattans and I a coke. Music sprayed from its electrical hose--garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--except relax. If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls. "It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop. "Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that--but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!" I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way." "Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it--" It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing. "A young lady left over from last night," he said. Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away. He caught his first sailfish that day.