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behind by a car, then little Ruth, so poised but so vulnerable to people—but just then Borkan spoke from behind him: “It’s Chauncey. He’s had bad news, will you come?”
    Beyond the curtains, across the club’s central hallway, the door of a library closed except to members was now open, revealing floor lamps equidistant along the moroccoed silence, each glowing down on its table and leather chair, forming an island for the financier’s solitude, the divorcé’s meditation, the octogenarian’s brandied sleep. The Judge had never seen it before, not being a member of this club or likely to be, though he knew its more public rooms well—since the depression, clubs like these had opened them to certain functions where some members were also involved.
    He ran forward now with the short steps which from the rear made him seem like a boy in a dinner jacket, or like a quick-flying little prelate, if he had had a cape. A small group of men halfway down the room parted to let him through. Chauncey Olney was sitting in one of the chairs. He must once have been very tall, this man who would never see ninety again, his head still high and Venetian against the wing-back, his knees angled sharply, cloth-gaitered feet easily touching the floor. A silvery quiet surrounded him, an invisible weapon from which the other men had fallen back. The Judge had seen old people in his own family use their age like this. They lacked embarrassment. This was all they had. A house doctor, who had just come forward with his black bag, was motioned away.
    “A body this age doesn’t shock, Doctor, don’t you know that? It just sits down.” Olney saw the Judge and gave him a rueful grimace, as if asking to be rescued from his own incontinence. “Simon.” He reached for a daily paper folded back on a pile of others and handed it over—a London Times. The Judge glanced automatically at the date: December 10, 1942—two months old.
    “Read it aloud,” said Olney. “He might at least have that.”
    The paper was creased to the obits page. The Judge read where Olney pointed, an ordinary family notice, not the casualty list.
    Died in action, last October 23rd at Alamein, Geoffrey Edward Audley-Taylor, only sort of Lucretia Olney and Charles Audley-Taylor. Services private.
    “They thought I mustn’t know,” said Olney. “My granddaughter Luce and her husband. Old people must be spared—that’s natural, isn’t it?” He stared at the circle of men. “They were hoping to smuggle it under. What’s unnatural about it? Even in war, the middle-aged have time for conspiracy. A natural disrespect for youth and age.” He seemed perfectly all right except for his little spate of talk. “I was too young to go, in ’61,” he said, conversationally. “Not yet twelve. But my mother, who was already a widow, bought my elder brother Julian a substitute; that was what was sometimes done. There’s that to be said for those of us who stayed at home in those days; we didn’t just pay for a walkie-talkie collections of wires and TNT, we bought us a full-grown, full-blooded man we could see. Oftentimes, it was somebody we knew.” His accent had Southerned; up to now, the Judge hadn’t recalled he was from there. “Wasn’t anything on the battlefield he couldn’t see by the dawn’s early light either, that substitute,” said Olney. “Or so they tell me. I was the wrong age for all the wars, all down the line. Like my father before me.”
    There was a whispering among the men around the doctor. “He’ll wear himself out. Can’t somebody get him home?”
    “There’s families that breed like that,” said Olney’s old voice, pursuing its thread. Whether he had heard them wasn’t clear, or was merely answering from the generalized determination of old men—to break in on events with what they thought they had. “Families that go on breeding behind the lines, or in the intervals. Or have men that for some reason or other get saved out. Or