Then came Miss Harkness.

She was a well-developed girl with a weather-beaten complexion and hands so horny that Ricky was reminded of hooves. A marked puffiness around the eyes bore evidence to her recent emotional contretemps. She wore jodhpurs and a checked shirt.

Julia introduced her all around. Miss Harkness changed her weight from foot to foot, nodded and sometimes said “Uh.” The Pharamonds all set up a conversational breeze while Jasper produced a tray of drinks. Ricky and Bruno drank beer and the family either sherry or white wine. Miss Harkness in a hoarse voice asked for Scotch and soda and downed it in three noisy gulps. Louis Pharamond began to talk to her about horses, and Ricky heard him say he had played polo badly in Brazil.

How pale they all were, Ricky thought. Really, they looked as if they had been forced, like vegetables under covers, and had come out severely bleached. Even Julia, a Pharamond only by marriage, was without color. Hers was a lovely pallor, a dramatic setting for her impertinent eyes and mouth. She was rather like an Aubrey Beardsley lady.

At luncheon, Ricky sat on her right and had Carlotta for his other neighbor. Diagonally opposite, by Jasper, and with Louis on her right, sat Miss Harkness with another whiskey and soda, and opposite her, on their father’s left, the little girls who were called Selina and Julietta. Louis was the darkest and much the most mondain of all the Pharamonds. He wore a threadlike black moustache and a silken jumper and was smoothly groomed. He continued to make one-sided conversation with Miss Harkness, bending his head towards her and laughing in a flirtatious manner into her baleful face. Ricky noticed that Carlotta, who, he gathered, was Louis’s cousin as well as his wife, glanced at him from time to time with amusement.

“Have you spotted our ‘Troy’?” Julia asked Ricky, and pointed to a picture above Jasper’s head. He had, but had been too shy to say so. It was a conversation piece — a man and a woman seated in the foreground, and behind them a row of wind-blown promenaders, dashingly indicated against a lively sky.