Free William F. Buckley Jr. by Brothers No More

wanted to stow away; the companionway was removed.
    It was all quite dreamy, Danny thought, looking at Caroline’s soft golden hair and oval face and brown eyes with an air of propriety, because although she had spent a total of only six weekends at Yale, beginning when she went to Smith to study after her mother’s death, something of a durable nature had begun. Danny had taken Caroline here and there, to campus parties, to fraternities, to sports events, and he liked later to accost his friends and put to them the question, Had they ever seen a dreamier girl? Most of them deferred to Danny. Now, looking at her as she stood alongside her brother peering over the ship’s rail at the receding Manhattan skyline, he knew suddenly what it was about her that was distinctive. Because of course a dozen—five dozen—girls crossed the campus every weekend who were knockouts to look at. What gave Caroline that special lift was adetachment from whatever the surrounding focus, never suggesting she wasn’t enjoying the hockey game or the post-game cocktail party or, at the moment, the wonderful view of a diminishing skyline, receding from sight even as the sun did; it was the other light in the eye. Required one day to say it in as many words, Danny told his roommate that it gave Caroline “four dimensions.” He confessed he did not know exactly what that meant, but then he did not know exactly what was the meaning of that other look in Caroline’s eye.
    Caroline quite apart, Danny thought, this trip was much more fun than last year’s, when he had traveled alone—more exactly, had set sail alone; because Danny was never alone for very long unless he made a strenuous effort to be alone, and he hadn’t on the
S.S. Georgic.
He had picked up a girl named Lala and also, he discovered when he got back to Yale, a case of clap.
    Caroline was entirely different, in that sense. He would never flirt sexually with Caroline. Besides, he felt in no hurry with Caroline, maybe because her own poise was somehow uninterruptible. There was an intactness there one didn’t play with. The first time he had seen her she was desolate, as who would not have been under the circumstances, but she was never quite—vulnerable. He loved to be in her company and when she was with him he was never asking himself, as characteristically he almost always did, what was he going to do next. What he was going to do next, he now reminded himself with pleasure, was sit down at the dinner table next to Caroline. And of course Henry. And, he supposed, the
S.S. Continental
’s management would stick a fourth person down at the table, presumably Lucy. He hoped Henry and Lucy would get on well together, hoped they would absorb each other.
    The European holiday would last eight weeks. On September 6 the
Continental
would end its eight round-trip journeys to New York, beginning in Nice. The route was Nice-Cherbourg-Southampton. Caroline would travel, during most of the vacation, with her brother, but the eighth and final week she would spend in Scotland at the summer house of the family of her Smith friend,Gladys Gibney. After leaving her, Henry would drive south from Paris along the Loire Valley and meet Danny at Nice. Together they would board the boat for the return passage, picking Caroline up at Southampton three days later.
    Accordingly they had separated when the
Continental
reached Southampton. The Chafees had their own itinerary, Danny his, which included some sailboat racing in Copenhagen and a leisurely drive in a rented car from Rome through Florence and Monaco to Nice.
    On the Monday before meeting up with Henry and boarding the ship for the return passage, Danny was at the Casino Royale. It was one in the morning and the great old gaming palace was still filling up. When he first saw it he wondered if anything at all had changed since the turn of the century. If he closed his eyes he could imagine it filled with men in Edwardian longcoats with muttonchop