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By Root 12375 0

its jubilant trumpets vanished around a turning on the Thames. Sophie’s room smote me instantly with delight. Though I know an eyesore when I see one, I have had very little sense of “taste,” of decor; yet I could tell that Sophie had achieved a kind of triumph over the inexhaustible pink. Rather than let the pink bully her, she had fought back, splashing the room with complementary hues of orange and green and red—a bright carnation bookcase here, an apricot bedspread there—and thus had vanquished the omnipresent and puerile stain. I wanted to burst out laughing at the way she had imbued that dumb Navy camouflage paint with such joy and warmth. And there were flowers. Flowers were everywhere—daffodils, tulips, gladioli; they sprouted from small table vases and from sconces on the wall. The place was fragrant with fresh flowers, and although they were abundant, there was no feeling of the sickroom amid all these blooms; they seemed instead simply festive, perfectly consonant with the gay flavor of the rest of the room.

Then I suddenly realized that Sophie and Nathan were nowhere in sight. Just as I was puzzling this out, I heard a giggle and saw a Japanese screen in one of the far corners give a little vibration. And from behind the screen, hand in hand, flashing uniform vaudevillian smiles, came Sophie and Nathan dancing a little two-step and wearing some of the most bewitchingly tailored clothes I had ever seen. More nearly costumes really, they were decidedly out of fashion—his being a white chalk-stripe gray flannel double-breasted suit of the kind made modish more than fifteen years before by the Prince of Wales; hers a pleated plum-colored satin skirt of the same period, a white flannel yachting jacket, and a burgundy beret tilted over her brow. Yet there was nothing hand-me-down about these two relics, they were clearly expensive and too well-fitting to be anything but custom-made. I felt desolate in my white Arrow shirt and its rolled-up sleeves and with my nondescript baggy slacks.

“Don’t worry,” Nathan said a few moments later, while he was fetching a quart bottle of beer from the refrigerator and Sophie was setting out cheese and crackers. “Don’t worry about your clothes. Just because we dress up like this is no reason for you to feel uncomfortable. It’s just a little fad of ours.” I had slumped pleasurably in a chair, utterly shorn of my resolve to terminate our brief acquaintance. What caused this turnabout is almost impossible to explain. I suspect it was a combination of things. The delightful room, the unexpected and farcical costumery, the beer, Nathan’s demonstrative warmth and eagerness to make amends, Sophie’s calamitous effect on my heart—all these had wiped out my will power. Thus I was once again their pawn. “It’s just a little hobby of ours,” he went on to explain over, or through, limpid Vivaldi as Sophie bustled about in the kitchenette. “Today we’re wearing early thirties. But we’ve got clothes from the twenties, World War One period, Gay Nineties, even earlier than that. Naturally, we only dress up like this on a Sunday or a holiday when we’re together.”

“Don’t people stare?” I asked. “And isn’t it kind of expensive?”

“Sure they stare,” he said. “That’s part of the fun. Sometimes—like with our Gay Nineties outfit—we cause a hell of a commotion. As for expense, it’s not much more expensive than regular clothes. There’s this tailor on Fulton Street will make up anything I want so long as I bring him the right patterns.”

I nodded agreeably. Although perhaps a touch exhibitionistic, it seemed a fairly harmless diversion. Certainly with their splendid good looks, emphasized even more by the contrast between his smoky Levantine features and her pale radiance, Sophie and Nathan would be an eyeful sauntering along together in almost anything. “It was Sophie’s idea,” Nathan explained further, “and she’s right. People look drab on the street. They all look alike, walking around in uniform. Clothes like these have individuality. Style. That’s why it’s fun when people stare at us.” He paused to fill