494
PARTISAN REVIEW
and hurl the salad." This was a famous new joke in the family.
Elwin had made it, Margaret loved it. It had reference to a "tossed
green salad" on a pretentious restaurant menu. Of the salad, when
it was served to them in all its wiltedness, Elwin had said that ap–
parently it needed to be more than tossed, it needed to be hurled.
And so all at once the family was restored, a family with a family
joke. Margaret stood there grinning in the embarrassment of the
voluptuous pleasure she felt at happiness returned. But she must have
been very angry with her mother, for she came back and pulled
Elwin's head down and whispered into his ear where he would be
able to find and inspect the presents she had for Lucy's birthday
next week.
He was to look for two things. In the top left-hand drawer of
Margaret's desk he would find the "bought present" and on the shelf
in the clothes closet he would find the "made present." The bought
present was a wallet, a beautiful green wallet, so clearly expensive
that Elwin understood why his daughter had had to tease him for
money to supplement her savings, and so adult in its expensiveness
that he had to understand how inexorably she was growing up.
The made present was also green, a green lamb, large enough to
have to be held in two hands, with black feet and wide black eyes.
The eyes stared out with a great charming question to the world,
expressing the comic grace of the lamb's awkwardness. Elwin won–
dered if Margaret had been at all aware of how much the lamb was
a self-portrait. When Elwin, some two years before, had listened to
his daughter playing her first full piece on the recorder, he had
thought that nothing could be more wonderful than the impervious
gravity of her face as her eyes focussed on the bell of the instrument
and on the music-book while she blew her tune in a daze of con–
centration; yet only a few months later, when she had progressed
so far as to be up to airs from Mozart, she had been able, in the
very midst of a roulade, with her fingers moving fast, to glance up at
him with a twinkling, sidelong look, her mouth puckering in a smile
as she kept her lips pursed, amused by the music, amused by the
frank excess of its ornamentation and by her own virtuosity. For
Elwin the smile was the expression of gay and conscious life, of life
innocently aware of itself and fond of itself, and, although there was
something painful in having to make the admission, it was even more
endearing than Margaret's earlier gravity. Life aware of itself seemed
so much more life.
His daughter's room was full of life. His own old microscope
stood on Margaret's desk and around it was a litter of slides and of
