THE PASSAGE -
Thede was music from my neighbors house through the summer nights. In nd tue Chadens men and giri canne and ores househros ah th she whisperings and tve tower one and the Stars. and id Ike nothern watched is guests dinorom the
St tre this raft or taking A sin ne in the alert of batch while his two morehdat
stiho waters of the Sound anon the paand frataract dita. On weeke in the
Rolls. Royce became an on drawing aquapartes to and toots ty, between nine on he morning and long past minnies, while is station wagon sampered like a brisk yeldall day to meet all trains. And on Mondt, yelle his station incong am xtra gardener tolleavages with mops and scrubbing Mouses and termans indudidenars, repairing the ravages
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-aves.
Monday these same oranges and sand leons arrived for in a pyramid of pulpless hages i There was a machine in hes and n mons left his back doore inice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden.
On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.
In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know
one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun.
