CHAPTER 17

I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around defiantly, rather like Max's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!"

As soon as her voice stopped, ceasing to hold my attention, I sensed the basic insincerity of what she had said.

It made me uneasy, as though the entire evening had been a ruse to extract a sympathetic response from me. I waited, and sure enough, she

soon looked at me with a knowing smirk, as if she had claimed her membership in a rather exclusive secret society to which she and Max belonged.

Inside, the crimson room was aglow with light. Max and Casey sat at either end of the long couch

while she read aloud to him from the *Saturday Evening Post*—the words, murmurous and uninflected, blending into a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his

boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we entered, she held us silent for a moment with a raised hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently checking the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Casey's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," Lily explained, "over at Westchester."