Triumph Read Online Free

in the other, a greenish-yellow potion in an old-fashioned glass.

    After replacing the phone she fini6hed the drink; ice tinkled, jewels on her fingers flashed, and a ray of sun leaked through an awning aperture. It set the red in her nearly-black, wavy hair gleaming with a beauty that, Ben thought, was probably natural, though carefully nurtured.

    She saw him. "Ben, darling! Join me!"
    He approached on a carpet so deep it almost seemed to require a balancing effort. She added, "Mind the stairs! Five of them. down to here! If you trip--and people have done it-
    -you can land in the goldfish poo!."

    He laughed, lightly came down the steps, took her hand. "You look marvelous, Valerie!"

    She surveyed him, holding his hand, standing--tall, graceful, and glad to see him, plainly. More glad, he thought, than usual. And perceived the obvious reason: Faith was engaged to Barlow so he was no longer a potential peril. He noticed that her dark eyes had a too-wet glitter not from tears but owing to her sad affliction. Her addiction. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands of women like this one "had everything" and also had the same disease. Women similarly shielded in their illness by friends and family and by their own refusal to acknowledge that they were alcoholics.

    "You look, Ben," she finally said, "as pale as an oyster; and you seem to get more round-shouldered every month. You need to get outdoors more, take some exercise!
    Meantime, how about a slalom?"

    "Slalom?"

    Valerie lifted her glass and rattled the ice. "A little drinkee I concocted, and named. 'Slaloms' are those tricky zigzags in skiing that make so many people fall down!"
    She laughed, a bit too heartily.

    Ben shook his head. "Not cocktail time for your round-shouldered, pallid, physicist friend. But, iced coffee?"

    Valerie nodded, pressed a button, spoke into something invisible from his angle, and ordered another slalom with his iced coffee.

    Afterward she chattered. "Vance just phoned. He's still in New York, at the office.
    He had expected to come out for dinner but he has a meeting." She paused. "Meeting,"
    she repeated, rather dully. "With his Far East manager, he says. Who was to be out here also. And has a daughter. Charming, Vance says. The girl was in Maine but she's driving down and expects to reach here any minute. I haven't met these Lee people." She waited while Paulus Davey brought the two beverages and until she could take a few slow, multiple swallows of her slalom. Her ensuing, "Thank you, Paulus!" was a trifle too stiff and at the same time too vigorous. The Negro bowed--sadly, Ben felt--and left.

    Valerie mused, "I wonder if they're related to the Robert E. Lee family. I know half a dozen people who are."

    He sipped his sugared and creamed cool coffee and reflected that he had never before considered the probability of living relatives of the Civil War general, either direct descendants or collateral. No doubt there were many, and no doubt the Farr's knew those who were illustrious, wealthy, or social--or all three. He also reflected that, as a Bernman, he was related to sundry other Bernmans, to Koviskis, a Cohen, certain Steins, and one Walters family that had once been Wildenbeiter.

    Faith appeared, then, in a dress like amber mist, and when she crossed a ladder of sunbeams he had a momentary glimpse of most of Faith. She was smiling and her eyes danced. "Imagine!" she exclaimed. "I've just had a long, long talk with Kit. And he's not coming for dinner! Because why? Because he's down at the Yacht Club and he made a bet he could swim from the dock there to Savin Rock--must be a dozen miles. The idiot is starting right now!"

    "We're being abandoned right and left," Valerie said to Ben, somewhat irritatedly; she carried that tone in her subsequent words to Faith: "You seem to be totally undismayed."

    "Why, of course! Because now I'll have Ben to myself all evening!"

    Mrs. Farr's eyes gleamed briefly with temper. But she controlled