610
PARTISAN REVIEW
as a view of wild red berries in a field of snow.
"It's wonderful to meet you. We're cousins. Did you know that?"
she asked.
"I suppose I did."
"I looked it up last evening. Third cousins. That's no-man's land if
you get down to it." She laughed with such a direct look (as if to speak
of how very attractive a man younger than herself might be if she liked
him) that Hugh Montague actually stirred. I knew little enough yet of
jealousy, but I could feel the wave that came over from him.
"Well, I must tell you," she said,
"all
the while Hugh was taking us
up this dreadful pitch, I kept saying I wouldn't marry him until he
promised never to do such a thing to me again, whereupon he said,
'You and Harry Hubbard are in the same boat.' He banishes us equally
from his grubby art."
"Actually," said Hugh Montague, "she's a little better than you,
Harry. All the same, it's hopeless."
"Well, I should hope so," said Maisie Gardiner. "Fool's play to
risk your neck on ice."
"I love it," said Kittredge. "The only thing Hugh would bother to
explain was, 'Ice won't betray you until it does.' What a husband you'll
make.'
"Relatively secure," said Hugh.
Rodman Knowles Gardiner had a coughing fit at the thought of
his daughter in marriage.
At precisely that moment Kittredge said, "I believe Daddy thinks of
me as Desdemona."
"I don't see myself," said her father, "as a blackamoor, nor es–
poused to my daughter. You have rotten logic, darling."
Kittredge changed the subject.
"Never did any ice climbing?" she asked of me. When I shook my
head, Kittredge said, "It's no worse than the awful thing they do to you
at the Farm when you have to leap out of a mud ditch and scramble up
a link fence in between sweeps of the searchlight." She stopped, but not
in caution, more to calculate when I would be eligible for that chore.
"I guess you'll be getting into it year after next. The fence is modeled
on the Grosse-Ullner barrier in East Germany."
Hugh Montague gave a smile with no amusement in it. "Kittredge,
don't practice indiscretion as if it were your metier."
"No," said Kittredge, "I'm home. I want to talk. We're not in
Washington, and I'm tired of pretending through one blah-blah cocktail
party after another that I'm a little rue clerk at Treasury. 'Oh,' they say,
'what do you me?' 'Oodles of stuff,' I tell them back. 'Statistics.' They
know I'm lying. Obviously, I'm a madwoman spook. It stands out."
