Whether it's a telephone call from his father that sparks the question or his own unpleasant, bitter little trace of accent, Adrian doesn't know, but none of his friends can resist asking it. When Danny does, for reasons he can't understand himself, it makes his angry, frighteningly angry.

"My mother was pregnant with me and thought it was no place to raise a child. They packed their bags and they left."

Danny regards him with solemn innocence. "Are you Jewish?"

"What? No! Of course not!"

Now he thinks he might have misspoken, or had the wrong tone of voice (practically outraged) and for a moment his narrow, childish line of sight widens and he realizes Daniel's father is right there and wearing an expression of surprise identical to his own. Adrian isn't like his father, not even then; he's dimly aware that he has this to fear and this horror will only get worse as he grows up, growing with him. There is a hand on his shoulder and a very soothing voice.

"It's late, buddy, maybe we should take you home."

But Adrian's posture already has sharpened, telegraphing loud and clear; mortified he's planted to the spot.

I don't want to go! "No one minds if I stay out past dark. I'm responsible for myself." As his own mouth shapes the words he could not sound more tartly smug.

And then those saving words: "There's always tomorrow.."

---

When Adrian is woken from his reverie of books and his new playmate's company, quite a bit of time has passed. His collected plant life (Danny struggles a little to say "specimens") ends up swaddled between two sheets of paper and stuffed inside a combined volume of Homer, the way girls press flowers.

It's a dazy kind of tedium for the next few days, lying about by the pool without a lot of interest in doing anything. Even his well-meaning recommendations that his cousins hold off on swimming after eating (lest they get a cramp and die, which seems unlikely, but you must be careful about these things) just get his sunburn slapped. Parental supervision is suspiciously absent, mostly because Mother doesn't like to be outdoors when she could be having a drink inside and catching up.

At last Uncle William has a week properly off, to spend with his wholesomely complete borrowed family. It soon becomes evident why Diana speaks of him so freely, with a laugh in her voice; the older boys have no especial regard for him, but she sees him as entertainment, a curious intruder she can't yet see as part of her family.
His company is something Adrian seeks for a few days, tagging along on drives and long conversations in the evening out on the lawn. William is intelligent enough to carry on a good discussion with, and if he can't be that much younger than Adrian's own father, he neither looks nor acts like it, with no gray in his glossy dark hair and an accent from nowhere further afield than New England. He's rather handsome, even, in the rather blunted way Adrian can recognize that Lydia is beautiful or that his mother was once beautiful. But he always seems to be laughing, amused by serious questions, and teases him for looking too grave, who died? His manner is like that of a favorite schoolteacher.

It only happens when they're alone together, lying on the grass after the girls have gone home in the evening, that Will places himself too close. His hand slides under Adrian's sweater again, his belt, not on accident; Adrian blinks. The hazy glow has vanished from the air, burned up in a second, and his mind snaps back into rigid attention. Of course he doesn't say anything, because that would be rude, but his throat is jammed anyway, refusing to work. But the rest of him does what it seems to find prudent and recoils. The point is taken.

The man never tries anything else, but he doesn't need to; the offense was too grave. And he can try to read meaning into it, but it shows only his own dizzy worries and deep, deep discomforts. It feels unsafe and unpleasant.

---

Diana invites him horseback riding with her the next day, which he might have enjoyed, but his head is still spinning. In the evening he takes the heavy edition from the Dreiberg's house and hides under the covers with it. Not with the necessity of a flashlight, just on his belly with the book on his pillow shedding bits of pressed fern. He picks up where he left off, and it's like being home again for a little while.

It's stupid, this whole historical affair over a woman-- two women, counting Briseis-- but lonely Helen is more interesting than people seemed to think. She deserved better than Paris, certainly, ill Paris, most fair in semblance, deceiver, woman-mad. He breathes each line out loud at first, voice trembling like his hands are trembling, but the rhythm of each line soon worms its way into his thoughts and he has no need to. He could have tore through the book at an unhindered pace, the sort of voracious reading that got him into trouble in class, but each line and book has to be taken very deliberately, word by word.

And when when rosy-fingered Dawn appears, he's significantly improved.