CHAPTER 57

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

On Sunday morning, while church bells rang in the villages along the shore, the world and its mistress returned to Alex Sterling's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.

"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers.

"One time he killed a man who had found out that he was the nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that crystal glass."

Once, I wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to Alex Sterling's house that summer.

It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds and headed "This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922." But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Alex Sterling's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a man named Bunsen whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who drowned last summer up in Maine.

And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaire and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.

And the Ismay's and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.