CHAPTER 48

"He's just a man named Sterling."

"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?"

"Now YOU've started on that topic," she replied with a faint smile. "Well,—he once told me he was an Oxford man."

A vague background began to take shape behind him, but at her next remark, it faded away.

"However, I don't believe it." "Why not?"

"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there."

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's 'I think he killed a man,' and stirred my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that

Sterling came from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was understandable.

But young men didn't—at least in my provincial inexperience, I believed they didn't—drift coolly out of nowhere and purchase a palace on Long Island Sound.

"Anyway, he throws large parties," said Casey, changing the subject with a sophisticated distaste for specifics. "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties, there isn't any privacy."

The boom of a bass drum was heard, and the orchestra leader's voice rang out above the garden's din. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced.

"At Mr. Sterling's request, we are going to perform Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which caused quite a stir at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know it