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By Root 5085 0

of the taxi, were made of iron and were secured with a chain and padlock. There was a smaller gate on the left and he went in there and walked through the heavy rain to the lights of what he guessed was a gatehouse or cottage. A middle-aged man came to the door—he was eating—and seemed delighted when Moses gave his name. “I’ma Giacomo,” he said. “I’ma Giacomo. You comea with me.” Moses followed him into an old garage, rank with the particular damp of cold concrete that goes so swiftly to the bone. There, in the glare, stood an old Rolls-Royce with a crescent-windowed tonneau like the privy at West Farm. Moses got into the front while Giacomo began to work the fuel pump and it took him some time to get the car started. “She’sa nearly dead,” Giacomo said. “She’sa no good for night driving.” Then they backed like a warship out into the rain. There were no windshield wipers or Giacomo did not use them and they traveled without headlights up a winding drive. Then suddenly Moses saw the lights of Clear Haven. There seemed to be hundreds of them—they were so numerous that they lighted the road and lifted his spirits. Moses thanked Giacomo and carried his suitcase through the rain to the shelter of a big porch that was carved and ribbed like the porch of a cathedral. The only bell he saw to ring was a contraption of wrought-iron leaves and roses, so fanciful and old that he was afraid it might come down on his head if he used it, and he pounded on the door with his fist. A maid let him in and he stepped into a kind of rotunda and at the same time Melissa appeared in another door. He put down his bag, let the rain run out of the brim of his hat and gathered his beloved up in his arms.

His clothes were wet and a little rancid as well. “I suppose you could change,” Melissa said, “but there isn’t much time.…” He recognized in her look of mingled anxiety and pleasure the suspense of someone who introduces one part of life into another, feeling insecurely that they may clash and involve a choice or a parting. He felt her suspense as she took his arm and led him across a floor where their footsteps rang on the black-and-white marble. It was unlike Moses, but to tell the truth he looked neither to the left where he heard the sounds of a fountain nor to the right where he smelled the sweet earth of a conservatory, feeling, like Cousin Honora, that to pretend to have been born and bred in whatever environment one found oneself was a mark of character.

He was in a sense right in resisting his curiosity, for Clear Haven had been put together for the purpose of impressing strangers. No one had ever counted the rooms—no one, that is, but a vulgar and ambitious cousin who had spent one rainy afternoon this way, feeling that splendor could be conveyed in numbers. She had come up with the sum of ninety-two but no one knew whether or not she had counted the maid’s rooms, the bathrooms and the odd, unused rooms, some of them without windows, that had been created by the numerous additions to the place, for the house had grown, reflecting the stubborn and eccentric turns of Justina’s mind. When she had bought the great hall from the Villa Peschere in Milan she had cabled the architect, telling him to attach it to the small library. She would not have bought the hall if she had known that she would be offered the drawing room from the Château de la Muette a week later, and she wrote the architect asking him to attach this to the little dining room and advising him that she had bought four marble fountains representing the four seasons. Then the architect wrote saying that the fountains had arrived and that since there was no room for them in the house would she approve his plans for a winter garden to be attached to the hall from Milan? She cabled back her approval and bought that afternoon a small chapel that could be attached to the painted room that Mr. Scaddon had given her on her birthday. People often said that she bought more rooms than she knew how to use; but she used them all. She was not one of those collectors who let their prizes rot