A woman’s sharp voice said, “Well say listen, what was that? It was a dandy piece.” And Edward heard the man with a cocktail shaker between his knees reply, “That was the song of the twelve eagles after the emeralds of the South Sea lost their fragrance.” Someone added, “They were crushed the day the love-tinker died on a hill of violets in Vienna.” Edward Williams was pleased with this conversation, although, of course, he knew that it had not taken place. He knew well that he was more than half deaf and in many moods he welcomed the insight that his infirmity gave him into matters that did not exist. His two friends had been telling each other facts that both knew and that Edward did not wish to know. Neither would, of course, dream of mentioning emeralds or hills of violets except when it was really necessary and helpful to do so. Edward did not care. He felt that his mind’s eye had acquired one picture the more without the trouble of acquiring a fact. Some music that did not interest Edward began and Edward thought, “I wish I were really musical, but if I wear this grave half-shut expression everybody will think I am very musical indeed.” Nobody looked at him, but he persisted in his selected expression. Miss Rhoda Romero’s pictures hung all round the room. Of these Edward thought, “If I am asked I will look at them in silence with a chin-down, eye-up sort of look, as if the sun were in my eyes and then say ‘A-ha’ once slowly. Then people will think I know how good they are—if they are good.” But he never had had a chance to do this, because nobody had ever formally introduced him to the pictures. Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.