VII

world is a port on the Persian Gulf. But it is wrong to believe everything we hear. When New York decides to be hot, the temperature of the Persian port must be agreeable by comparison.

One fetid noon Annandale fled. When he stopped it was at Narragansett.

Before August comes and with it the mob, Narragansett is charming. There is a mile of empty hotels, a stretch of sand fine as face powder, a heaving, heavenly desert of blue and an atmosphere charged with ozone and desire.

In August the hotels are packed. The stretch of sand is a stage. Every day a ballet is given there. The coryphées are the prettiest girls in the world⁠—girls from Baltimore, girls from Philadelphia, girls from everywhere, girls with the Occident in their eyes and lips that say “Drink me.”

At high noon, from the greenroom of the bathhouses, Sweet-and-twenty floats down, clasps the sea to the hum of harps, breasts the waves to the laugh of brass and reemerges to the sound of trumpets.

After the dip, other diversions. Primarily flirtations on the lawns; later, polo at the Country Club; at night, dancing in the ballrooms, more flirtations on the galleries of the Casino, supper on the terrace below.

The terrace resembles, or, more exactly, on this particular summer did resemble, a roof garden on the ground floor. From a kiosk a band of Hungarians distributed selections of popular rot, sometimes their own delirious czardas. There, circled by variegated lights, fanned by the violins, girls and men sat beneath the high, wide, flowerful umbrellas of Japan.

Sometimes some of them, wearying of that, wandered into silences and shadows and lingered there, occupied with the crops, with strikes and other subjects of national interest which young people always discuss when holding hands in the dark.