The big round ballroom of the club was decorated with autumn leaves of all kinds and colors, the chandeliers studded richly with pinecones, and here and there in the reddish-brown and yellow leaves hung a baby pumpkin. Once he was there, commencing his usual solitary patrol of the sidelines, Vic began to enjoy himself. He supposed he had momentarily, at home, doubted his own aplomb. He really hadn't known how much to believe of what Trixie had told him. Now he found it very interesting to stroll by or to stand near the same groups of people that he had seen in July. There was Mrs. Podnansky, warmer and friendlier than ever. The MacPhersons—surely no change in them: Mac looked pink-eyed drunk at ten o'clock, though he was going to hold it well all evening probably; and as for his wife, if she betrayed any suspicion of Vic by the long curious look she gave him as she greeted him, it seemed to be canceled out by her remark that he had certainly trimmed down.
"Did you go on a diet?" she asked, with admiration. "I wish you'd tell me about it."
And just for the fun of it, Vic stood with them awhile, telling them about a diet that he made up as he talked. Hamburger and grapefruit, nothing else. The hamburger could be varied with onions or not. But nothing else. "The idea is to get so tired of hamburger and grapefruit that you don't even eat those," Vic said, smiling. "That finally happens."
Mrs. MacPherson was very interested indeed, though Vic knew as surely as he was standing there that she would never lose an inch from her sturdy waistline. And if she happened to mention the diet to Melinda, and Melinda knew nothing about it, that was as usual for Melinda, who, everybody knew, neither cared nor was aware of what her husband did or ate.
Everybody was cordial, and Vic felt that his own manner was after all just about as cheerful as it had been in July. He asked Mary Meller to dance with him not once but twice. Then he danced with Evelyn Cowan. He did not ask Melinda to dance because he did not want to dance with her. He was concerned, however, with whether she had a fairly good time or not. He did not want her to be miserable. The Mellers were kind enough to talk with her for a while, he noticed, and then she danced with a man Vic had never seen before. Vic supposed she would get along, even though most of their friends—including the MacPhersons, he saw—certainly were not smiling upon her tonight. Vic had a drink with Horace at the long curved bar at the side of the room, and he told Horace about the Italian manuscript he had received. It was the diary of a semi-illiterate grandmother, who had come to America with her husband, from Sicily, at the age of twenty-six. Vic thought of cleaning up the manuscript just enough to make it intelligible, cutting it somewhat, and printing it. It covered the Coolidge administration in a most fantastic way, and the whole text, which related mostly to the upbringing of three boys and two girls was interpolated with extremely funny comments on politics and current sports heroes such as Primo Carnera. One of her sons joined the police force, another went back to Italy, a third became a bookie for the illegal numbers games, one of the daughters went through college and married, and the other married and went with her engineer husband to live in South America. The woman's Impressions of South America, from her home on Carmine Street, Manhattan, were alternately funny and hair-raising. Vic made Horace laugh loudly.
"Isn't this a new departure for you?" Horace asked.
Then Vic looked and saw Melinda standing with Ralph Gosden and the man she had danced with a couple of times this evening. "Yes," Vic said. "But it's time I had one. The married daughter in South America sent me the manuscript. It's an absolute fluke, you see. She said she read about the Greenspur Press in some South American publication and learned that I printed things in other languages besides English, so she was sending me her mother's diary, she said, in case I might be interested. It was a charming letter. Very modest and very hopeful at the same time. I'm thinking of printing the book half in Italian and half in English, as I did Xenophon. So 'few' people would be able to understand this dialect."
"How do you manage to read it? Do you know Italian that well?" Horace asked.
"No, but I can read it reasonably well with a dictionary, and I happen to have a dictionary of Italian dialects at home. Picked it up in New York secondhand years ago, God knows why, but now it comes in handy. I can make out nearly everything. The woman's handwriting is very clear, thank God."
Horace shook his head. "The man of many parts."
Looking toward Melinda, Vic caught the eye of the heavyset man she had been dancing with, who was just then staring at him. Even from far across the room Vic saw that the man's stare was naïvely curious. Perhaps Melinda had just been pointing him out to the man. Ralph was standing
