East of Eden
Date: 2025-04-03T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women novelists -- Fiction; Romans à clef; Spouses -- Fiction

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Title: East of Eden

Author: Isa Glenn

Release date: April 3, 2025 [eBook #75781]

Language: English

Original publication: Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co, 1932

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75781

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EAST OF EDEN ***

EVA LITCHFIELD
was banished from Eden by either beauty or genius, whichever one chose to consider the irrelevant factor of her character. If she herself had known what she wanted most, she would have liked to write her novels in a tranquil, mental world where there was no room for lovers.

She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astonished, but no physical impression would have been made on her. She was like a crystal. A blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her.

Eva’s marriage to Nicholas Van Suydam of the Dutch Van Suydams who inherited Manhattan and upheld the ancient family traditions with stolid charm, was doomed to unhappiness.

Miss Glenn creates the strangely living and attractive personality of a lovely, untouchable woman and a genius, against the background of contemporary literary New York, a New York brilliantly sketched with wit and a light touch of satire. In subject East of Eden is a vivid contrast to Miss Glenn’s Transport and A Short History of Julia.

EAST OF EDEN

BOOKS BY
Isa Glenn

EAST OF EDEN
A SHORT HISTORY OF JULIA
TRANSPORT
SOUTHERN CHARM
LITTLE PITCHERS
HEAT

EAST OF EDEN

Isa Glenn

Doubleday, Doran
and Company, Inc.
Garden City, N. Y.
1932

PRINTED AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN CITY, N. Y., U. S. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1932
BY ISA GLENN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIRST EDITION

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

GENESIS iii. 23-24.

CONTENTS

Part One | Page | 3
Part Two | Page | 83
Part Three | Page | 133
Part Four | Page | 221
Part Five | Page | 281

PART ONE

I

I realized that I was sorry to be back in New York. Molly Underhill had telephoned: “Oh, darling, I’m so remorseful that we didn’t meet your ship! Eva Litchfield and I were going to be waiting for you with cheers because you’re home at last, and then Eva couldn’t get away. She’s in the last throes of a book, you know—or maybe you don’t know; you’ve become an expatriate, haven’t you?” Gasping, lisping, gushingly affectionate because she was speaking to me instead of talking about me, she eventually came to the point and invited me to dine with her at our old haunt, one of those establishments run by an Italian whose name it would be a shame to give. There was much to hear, she assured me; things had been popping, as they could pop only in New York. “But I’ll tell all, in the taxi,” she promised. “Only, the drive will be short, and the tale is long.”

In New York, the tale is always long, but one gets it in fragments delivered between the necessary snatches of sleep and the attenuated diet of the New Yorker determined to be slim. Molly explained that she was at liberty to introduce me, in a way of speaking, to the city that had so radically changed, so phenomenally grown, during my protracted stay abroad: she had finished the proofs of a volume of her poems and, she added, as usual when she had sojourned in the empyrean, she felt the need of a strongly human contact. I informed her that on my own part I had come back to write a book about the ways and mistakes of Americans in France; one had to get out of a place in order to write a novel about it. When conversing with Molly Underhill, the trick was to watch her face; her expression might not harmonize with her words. I was at a disadvantage when she drawled: “And then, my lamb, you purpose leaving New York in order to write a book about us? Oh, you’ll get stories out of us! You can’t conceive of the racket instituted by our crowd; and Eva Litchfield is our pacemaker. I suspect it’s because of an underlying discontent with her failure in the marriage line.”

Molly forced information only upon reluctant listeners. It was as if I harboured no curiosity that I asked: “Why do you call it a failure?”

“The look in her mother-in-law’s eye,” chuckled Molly; and hung up. She had a lip-licking chuckle. It prepared me to combat whatever position she had taken in regard to Eva Litchfield. I did not go so far as to decide to range myself squarely on Eva’s side, it being problematical if a fight were raging around her or if she herself had precipitated some squabble among her friends. This point time, and no human reasoning, would clear up. In our crowd, one always disputed, but the gage of battle, promptly trampled underfoot, was soon overlooked, the war cry settled on when all was over.

The frantic American spirit of crowding into a day all that should be spread over a week caught me up and swept me out to be lost in a sea of controversial gossip. I found my time arranged for; I was to rush from one engagement to another without the necessary pauses in which to piece together my impressions of things told me. I was to lunch with Charles Glidden the novelist, in a “quiet little place where we can talk about Eva Litchfield’s married life.” I was to go to Sutton Place for cocktails with Florence Quincy the short-story writer, who would invite only a few people “so that we can talk about poor Eva’s fiasco.” In regard to Eva Litchfield, conditions in New York had not changed. From all sides would come allusions to her, stray information about her, acrimonious or friendly discussion of her. If she failed to set the pace in the sense alluded to by Molly Underhill, she set it in the way of arousing unflagging talk. She had, always, so set it. She was one of the women—lucky or unlucky, as one might consider them—who are discussed. I wished immensely to hear the latest arguments for and against her. I burned with curiosity, composed of friendship and of that prying interest of the novelist, to know the details of her marriage, which had taken place shortly after my departure for a stay of two years in France. Not having returned to New York for the purpose of finding out, today I realised that this was what I must find out. It became a piece of news that New York withheld only to drop on my head when I should be off my guard. The tales I was to hear would be partisan tales; the truth was the brick held in reserve. For, odious as I felt myself in wanting to know, I still feared to hear the truth. That I was promptly to hear everything else was left in no doubt; underlying the various invitations there was the projected weaving into a whole piece of those vicarious hints, those veiled prognostications, those omens of the future as read from the signposts of the immediate past, that our friends had left behind their occasional European travels. Authors do not write chatty letters to each other: they save their lucubrations for the printed work; and what they had dropped in the course of the necessarily hurried talk of casual encounters as we drifted anchorless had not exposed what might be the trouble between Eva Litchfield and Nicholas Van Suydam.

I said to myself: “Dinah Avery, my good woman, you had best furbish your own ideas—your recollections—before swimming out to sea. For swim out to sea you must, and will, before the day is over.” From the thirtieth-floor windows of my small apartment I looked at the sky-line whose fame was flashing around the world and was physically shocked: had corresponding changes taken place in my friends? With that sky-line assaulting my nerves it required no wide digression to speculate about Eva’s husband: he was one of the rising young architects of the city, and that the steel ribs of one or more monsters had been plucked from the side of this Adam was probable. I recalled him as a handsome man who lacked hardness of fibre. How could he bring about a drastic change in Eva? Life failed to scratch the surface of her absorption in her work. Her experiences were of the soul and not of the body. She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astounded, but no physical impression would have been made on her; she would still show to the world, and even to those friends in her confidence, a face almost nun-like in its essential purity. No man could hurt Eva for all time, I reflected comfortably: and at once I recalled the comment made on her by the caricaturist, Justo Zermonte. Zermonte had said without apology what many men had suspected but hesitated to acknowledge: Eva was a crystal, and a blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her.

As usual when she was being discussed, Spencer Mapes the essayist had been eager; he had an insect-like persistence in stinging; but he might have been as impersonally curious as Zermonte when he asked: “Where would that blow have to strike—the shattering blow, I mean?”

According to a trick of his, Zermonte was sketching on the back of a menu card and did not lift his eyes. He shrugged. Those human beings whose lines of cleavage had been struck the shattering blow were more vulnerable to caricature, and therefore more interesting to him, than the unbroken Eva Litchfield; he could not understand the writer’s desire to peel off the skins of the onion, for only the dreadful core was in his line. But Spencer Mapes of the literary mind continued to speculate; he seemed to buzz, when he so discussed his friends. “If the crystal were to be heated?” he suggested. Zermonte regretted that, not being a lapidary, he did not know. “I was wrong, of course,” Mapes kept at it. “A crystal can’t be heated.”

Eva had sat looking at them while they so arranged her under a microscope. She smiled with a faint amusement that could have been genuine but that was merely her lovely indifferent agreement on a point which failed to interest her; she had but a slight sense of humour. Humour would have marred the delicacy of her feeling for beauty. She tolerated no realism. Characteristically she suggested: “Why not have said a diamond? The diamond is eternal.” Nicholas Van Suydam, indeed, could not hurt her. She did not care whether her happiness were eternal if only her work would be.

But Molly had said, “The look in her mother-in-law’s eye.” I felt as if I were at the motion pictures, as if I were managing the picture; for I cranked the projecting machine a little further and saw, clearly and accurately, Nicholas Van Suydam’s mother as I had seen here in fact.

His publishers had given a tea to our favourite Englishman. The entresol of the Savoy Plaza roared with our lifted voices, and smelled of dying flowers, and occasionally someone paused long enough absent-mindedly to eat a sandwich. Eva Litchfield had taken possession of Nicholas Van Suydam and, as I recall, was in a less crowded room talking with him. She had not captured him against his will; never had I seen a young man so fatuously lifted above himself by a woman’s notice. Eva was a delicate thistledown blowing across his path, dazzling him, luring him. While I stayed, they did not again mingle with the crowd. And Spencer Mapes lingered near the door through which they had disappeared, leaning against the white woodwork with his own handsome head thrown back—not brooding but waiting.

The Englishman stood decently to receive those invited to meet him and no one wasted a minute on him. In a mild aside to those of us within hearing, he said that it was very New York. He stood watching the people who did not so much as glance at him because already they knew how he looked. They were in perpetual motion. They drew together and fell apart; and so quickly did they shift from group to group that one got the impression of their never quite closing their lips: what they had started to say in one group was continued in the next group in which they found themselves. It is impossible to accost a scuttling mouse: they dashed past the guest of honour with terrifying speed. The noise of the conclave surged down the stairs; and such was the volume of this concatenation that the elderly lady who now, with the most beautiful suddenness, appeared at the head of the stairs must have had to push against it as against material opposition. But this opposition which was not consciously directed against her had had, evidently, the effect of stiffening some as yet unrevealed resolution. Also, she might have been upheld by many taffeta petticoats. She was alone but gave the impression of being attended. And such was the security of her evident faith in her impregnable position that, too shrewd not to perceive that the crowd ignored her, she waved aside any discomfort arising from this by her own sweeping condemnation of all that she saw. Her cold grey eyes travelled from face to face, appraising with a complete and icy detachment—no interest whatever in who it might be the orbit of whose flight she chanced to observe.

Beyond a few curious glances, the milling crowd paid no attention to her. From his far doorway, Spencer Mapes, however, stared with absorption. James Pomeroy, adjusting his pince-nez, his fingers using on its narrow black ribbon the tenderness of touch that he would use on a rare old book, came up to say to the Englishman, “I saw her—on her way here, although it didn’t occur to me that she could conceivably be on the way here—driving uptown in a horse-drawn carriage!” But, at one time or another, most people had seen her maroon brougham with a red-faced coachman in a puce livery expertly handling a pair of bays. She might be said to be the last of the old buildings now in process of demolition. In a backwash formed by the elderly lady’s antagonistic near presence, the small cluster of us stood staring. Novelists stare because they never know when they will use a person as a character in a story. They stare without blinking, making no excuse to the object of their fixed regard; they are working a photographic memory. And here was a middle-aged woman who declined to appear younger than she was. It was a find. We examined her in unabashed glee.

On her own part, she looked at us and refused to see us. About her there was something of the lone knight girded for the combat. Her purpose was so definite that by it she was set aside from the people who aimlessly charged past; she waited for an opponent upon whom the eyes of her mind were already fixed. I think that we might have talked about her at the top of our lungs and she would not have stirred a muscle of her face, so bent was she on an exact aim. She was a force which had surged in on us. We felt her presence. But I got the impression that in spite of the opposition of her ignoring quiescence she watched us. She feared something; and that she refused to acknowledge the existence of this apprehension did not minimize it. On some one issue she had staked a thing so big that she quailed at the failure she had not yet in her soul acknowledged to be possible. Her hands, in too-small white gloves, clasped each other so tightly that the kid stretched, and drew, and bulged. But her face was composed—old ivory in its hard finish. Her decorous feet, in high buttoned boots, rested side by side, and it was evidently with an effort of her muscles that she kept them so properly on the floor; for she was by now seated on one of those dreadful hotel sofas that are slippery and are too high. About her there was something charming, and something forbidding, and through all, and arising from the cause of all, this emanation of terror. I got the idea that she forbade us to approach her because of this terror. But what that would touch her could we bring down on her?

Molly Underhill suggested: “She does look like a scared rat.” She looked like nothing of the sort; her fear was not fear of the fight but of what might cause the fight.

James Pomeroy said that he took his hat off to her. “I never before saw such iron self-control. Do you notice that she doesn’t tap her foot on the floor, as all women under stress do? For you’ll admit that she’s under stress?”

The Englishman undertook to explain her: he also was analysing her for future use. “I have an old aunt,” he began. “That generation of nice old ladies had no use for their own sex. You notice that her attention is riveted on Spencer Mapes? Oh—unobtrusively, delicately; but with such passion of feeling!”

“Spence wouldn’t see her even if she were younger. We all know—although we deny it, and can’t after all explain the ramifications of it—that he has eyes for no one besides Eva Litchfield. I’m not sure it’s love——” speculated Florence Quincy, who did not care. This was an old question with us; none of us cared; but, not necessarily with viciousness but with the greatest persistence, we dissected Spencer Mapes’ intentions towards Eva.

The Englishman murmured that he intended making a virtue of his necessity to know more of her. He approached the elderly lady and enquired if there were something he could do for her. He was a huge man with a kind pink-and-white face and a gasping voice. Her own voice, when she replied, was dry as bone-dust, but she stated, graciously enough, that she recognized him by his pictures. Severely she added that she had thought the reception was given to him. And her somewhat acrid amusement, when he replied that so he had been given to understand, proved that her fear was not of the guests now hovering near.

She said: “I came to get my son.” There was finality about her announcement. In the same tone she might have said “I came to snatch my son from hell fire.”

“Your son, then, is a writer?” the Englishman ventured.

Her figure tightened: it was impossible for her to draw herself up; so far as one could see, she had drawn herself up at birth and never let go. “We have no artists in our family,” she gave him back. She remarked that she was Mrs. Schuyler Van Suydam, and added more kindly: “My son is by way of being an architect. Possibly, in England also, you permit your sons to play before they settle down?” She had disposed of the question of how she came to be there and was done with him. She swept the room with her disapproval, and turned her chilling regard back to the Englishman and disapproved of him. In spite of the alleged paucity of such stuff in her family, she was a great pantomime artist. She sat on her sofa—squarely in the middle as if to defy an author to sit beside her. But I saw that her throat was convulsed. Her eyes were bleak with more than her aversion to her surroundings.

The Englishman indulged in his soundless laughter. Throughout an attack of this mirth, he might be without emotion of any sort, so expressionless would be his face; it might be a physical instead of a mental spasm. He swallowed every second word of his reply, and on the resulting incoherence took himself off. He again mentioned his old aunt to us. He became so amused at the recollection that he gasped himself out of telling more. The old aunt remained in our memory as one who could well have been what is called a character. One had, always, to supplement what the Englishman recounted.

We had noticed, with annoyance, the presence at the tea of two intruders who were not potential characters. These intruders Mrs. Van Suydam now summoned. We did not see by what method she summoned them; when she summoned anyone, that person felt it in the air, possibly. But we heard her say to the young man “I shall be obliged if you will fetch my son.” Anthony Bloodgood was always in a state of high enjoyment; he laughed with his hazel eyes, and smiled with his too-small mouth over which he wore a little moustache because to twirl its speculative ends gave him something to do. He stood tugging at the ridiculous moustache. It was plain that he did not wish to do as she had requested. But she got the better of him. And then she obviously grew more and more uneasy. She sat tensely, looking at one spot on the wall. But by the steady flicker of her black bonnet against the sunset outside the window I saw that she was trembling. Often as I have seen Mrs. Van Suydam since my return to New York, I shall always think of her as she was that afternoon: her bonnet trembling against the sunset and her feet curiously still. And suddenly she laughed, that aged laugh with a cracked high cackling in it. She was laughing at herself for trembling. The girl, Gertrude Cuyler, sat beside her on the sofa; and she sighed. It was the kind of sigh that sinks into the imagination as an ominous thing. The older woman took it as being personal to her as well as to the girl; the long breath that she drew was the suppression of a sigh as deep as the girl’s. They did not look at each other.

Anthony Bloodgood came back, his eyes wary now. He said: “Nick’s coming. He didn’t know you were to be here. He was talking to Eva Litchfield.”

It was a case of the individual against life. I acknowledge that I ran away. I heard afterwards that Eva married the son shortly after I left America.

The elder Mrs. Van Suydam had a marvellous power of waiting: was she waiting for what seemed to her the inevitable end of such a mating? Eva, I knew, could not wait; her interest was a bright flame that scorched, and burned, and defeated its end. In Molly Underhill’s telephonic chatter I had detected a dark undercurrent, a play of her fancy over what partly fed her liking for the gossip that is a dismembering of one’s friends and partly shook her. If the same chilly finger had been drawn down her spine and Eva’s she could not more surely have flinched.

Thoughtfully I walked up Fifth Avenue to lunch with Charles Glidden. It was one of those dull days when the skies seem to weep soot. Wishing, as I had inferred, to talk uninterruptedly, he had selected the one restaurant of all others that might be called our luncheon clubhouse. The game would be to do our confidential talking in an immense hurry and so forestall inquisitive friends who could be counted on to join us at any moment. Glidden was a delightful man with whom one could be silent without impoliteness and with whom, consequently, one always wished to talk. But one talked at him, and knew that his few mild comments on what was being imparted had little to do with what he might have said if he gossipped. In the fusillade of quotations from one’s friends that riddled us when something had happened, he could not be quoted: one might suspect him of the deep policy of being canny. His taciturnity sprang from no lack of interest in the foolishness of mankind; for if nothing was happening he made it happen. In his habit of being intimate for a while with one after another, and during this period diverting their tastes, he had been largely instrumental in forming the little circles which whirled, and dissolved, and spun into new orbits. And always he appeared to be intent on drawing out what his friends could offer on the altar of his esoteric amusement. In his definite withdrawal of himself from all upsetting contacts with unarranged life, Glidden docketed gatherings arranged according to his wish as exhibits in the closed museum of his mind. One sometimes had the creepy feeling that he listened to one’s thoughts. One never knew what he on his own part thought; whether he approved or whether he disapproved of anything remained a mystery. He had never been heard to criticise. And yet, all of criticism and deferred sentences were in his quiet eyes. When he watched in this fashion, his eyes did not reflect light, nor did they appear to move unless following the antics of the victim under observation. There was no way of predicting on whom his disconcerting scrutiny would fall next; his friends tried to read on his face what he had decided about them and failed alarmingly to get a clue.

I remembered the effect upon Eva of this trait in a man whose praise she very much wanted. We had dined at his apartment; and it was in the early days when she had been less certain of the reputation of her books: of their quality she had never experienced a doubt. The Glidden dinner table was always the quintessence of simplicity. Upon this occasion a single blossom, in a rare vase, leered insinuatingly from the centre of the board. “What is it?” we had asked, strangely attracted. He did not know, himself; he had thought it amusing. It might be, he speculated, the arrested product of an affair between an orchid and a tiger lily. Throughout the meal, the flower waved and nodded as if independent of any outside propulsion, amazingly giving the impression that from its calyx there burst its own ululation. Eva had become nervous and excited. She had sat at her host’s right, slim and shining, proud and rather rare; she might have had some remote kinship with the blossom that, slim and mocking, elevated its head above even the rarity of the vase that held it. Possibly Glidden had seen that his decoration and his guest of honour were in accord; he might have arranged it; his eyes stared with the same glassiness at Eva and at the flower.

Eva whispered to me: “I am in terror of his silence! He is like a hooded falcon. I never know what he truly thinks of my books. Has he ever told you what he thinks of my work?”

When I am nervous I suspect that I wear my hair too long; it falls over my forehead into my eyes, and I push at it and feel like swearing. “Ask him and see,” I suggested crossly.

But she gasped that she was afraid to; she could not bear it, if he said he did not believe in her; and Spencer Mapes had said, a moment before—I knew she was trying to stop thinking about what Mapes had said, because she surmised that the important thing was what he had not said. Molly Underhill often bragged that we were a peculiar lot; and sometimes we were afraid of each other, sometimes we were indifferent to each other, but always we were aware of each other. Molly herself, while pronouncing upon us, wore a blush like an angry sunset, a blush that cast her mouth into such shadow that she appeared to have no lips.

Speed being impossible on a New York street, I had time to brood, and laugh, over the agonies that we had lived through. “He’ll tell me nothing,” I promised myself.

The stench from the exhausts of automobiles, and the satanic thump of riveters at work, unable to escape from the earth’s envelope, hurled themselves back with malignancy, assaulting the senses with their hints of limbo. Along the side streets blew a clammy breath from rivers tainted as the air. A few dispirited snowflakes straggled downwards, as if aware that when they touched the pavement they would be violated by the grime of the life of a city. Pedestrians scooted, stopping erratically at the brink of the crossings, held back by the law but unprotected by these laws that they themselves had made. I found that already I had adjusted myself to great changes in New York: I dashed with the rest, for the short distance between the cross streets, keeping abreast of the motor traffic because at each of these crossings all living things, and all machinery, halted at the change of lights. Whenever we so halted, I looked fearfully up at cliffs of edifices. In these artificial cliffs at the base of which I in proportion crept, I seemed to feel the shaken fist of the city’s non-natural immensity.

The sound of horses’ hoofs, competing by its very insignificance with the magnitude of the roar of the motor traffic, came up behind me. Without turning my head, I knew who drove so insolently up and down a regulated Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Van Suydam, Eva Litchfield’s mother-in-law, was the last of the elderly ladies who had used to take their airing in horse-drawn vehicles.

Alone in her maroon brougham, refusing to enjoy the sights for which presumably she had come out, Mrs. Van Suydam did not relax; she sat upright because she had always sat straight, stood erect, and faced life with a stiff spine. She wore, as always, handsome black garments of a style introduced by Queen Alexandra. On her head perched her usual bonnet-like hat, made more secure in its insecurity by a tightly drawn wisp of veil ending at the tip of her intolerant nose. Never had Mrs. Van Suydam’s veil been observed to flutter, for hussies allowed their veils to flutter. Her eyelashes brushed against this mesh stretched in harlequin-like rhomboids, and were forced upward into rays, and lent her a startled aspect that belied her. Although she had driven uptown from her mansion in Washington Square North, she still tugged at her gloves that, in the fashion of the days when she was a girl and ladies had no use for their hands, were too small for her; she squeezed them over her palms and winced slightly; and as I watched her, in our parallel progress, she folded these white-kid-gloved hands of a lady, lifted her eyes against her veil, and stared icily ahead.

The green lights winked out, the red lights blinked on, and at the corner a policeman held up the hand of authority. Undoubtedly she said to herself that this was modern nonsense; for she lifted the speaking-trumpet to her lips and, I was sure, directed the coachman—his name was beautifully Higginson—to drive on. As she thus infringed the law, she sat with unyielding spine and met the cold stare of the lions in front of the Library and returned it with a stare as impersonally disparaging as their own. Not an emotion disturbed her features. She drove against the lights because she had never consented to recognize the lights. The hoofs of her horses seemed to make a sharper sound then ever, as Higginson flourished his whip over the sleek flanks of his pride and joy. And this breach of regulations apparently delighted the elderly coachman and left the elderly lady as it found her, indifferent. The policeman grinned at the bays whose tails, bobbed and gaily twitching, seemed to mock him, and, turning to the columns of automobiles over which he had control, shared the joke with various chauffeurs. As I halted on the curb, irresolute because without Mrs. Van Suydam’s scornful sureness, I heard him remark: “The ol’ girl don’t seem to take it in that she might get killed.” In this he was right. Mrs. Van Suydam had never recognized violent death.

Her lips moved: was it possible that she muttered? I followed the dart of her eyes as she stabbed with them a building in process of blatant construction. Her mutter had consisted of two short, sharp ejaculations, and embodied her ideas on progress. “Humph! Indeed!” This new architecture, which must have affronted her taste because of its difference from the red brick and white trim of her New York, was partly of her son’s making. She could not but feel that, in pursuing his ambition to build greatly, he had fallen into vagary. New York had been a pleasant town. By day the air had been clear and good to breathe, and by night a clean and intimate moon had looked down on family life. These days, the moon came up only to be faded by the vulgarity of beacons on spiky towers. The moon flinched: as she flinched: as she could wish that her son flinched.

The ringing sound of hoofs beat defiantly against the steady drone of motors rolling in two solid columns up and down the Avenue, and the snub nose of the perfect Higginson rose in air polluted by carbon monoxide.

Charles Glidden had lost no urbanity since I had last seen him. He had only one surprise up his sleeve: he was prepared to talk, and to talk about Eva, and it only required my question of how she was making out with the Van Suydams to bring it about. “I think it’s rather funny that she married that particular man,” I gurgled, with Mrs. Van Suydam in my mind’s eye.

He made the concession to his previous manner of turning upon me an opaque regard. “I never try to alter conditions amongst my friends. Diseases are so much more interesting than remedies.” This was as near the line of his intention as was usually got out of him.

“Ah that’s unfair to me,” I expostulated. “I meant no slur on Eva; it wasn’t necessary to throw me off a track.”

“But you’re so ambiguous in your talk,” he objected. However, he committed himself. “I think he’s a dreadful fellow. Of course, she revolts me, occasionally. What does she want? What is she reaching for? And what—and this is the interesting point—is she trying to do with this man she married?”

“I wish I knew,” I sighed.

“She herself doesn’t know. And what at best,” he lamented, “can we believe of what people tell us of themselves? There’s no compulsion on them to tell the truth—if they know it. You will have to judge by Eva’s actions. And the only consistent thing about her—the only thing running in a straight line dead ahead to a positive aim—is her work. The quality of her work never fluctuates; the quality of her social ambition, and the ambition, if one might so call it, of her heart, is influenced to an extraordinary degree by the subject matter of her books. Did you ever notice that she writes only of people living, with propriety, in old Georgian houses? There you are,” he laughed. “She writes her Georgian house, and then wishes with all her heart to live in it.”

I demanded to know why she was not, then, content? I reminded him that she had a Victorian mother-in-law living in a Georgian house. “And yet, since my return I’m hearing nothing but hints of trouble.”

He assured me that he was endeavouring to make me see it. “She reverses the custom about her cake: when she gets it she doesn’t wish to eat it because no longer does she understand why in the first place she wanted it.”

I sighed that she got herself into hopeless complications, and at once he was overwhelmed with masculine distaste. “Don’t try to ‘help’.” His smile could be nothing but an amiable sneer.

I was impatient. “Then what’s the answer?”

“Why do women invariably demand an answer? Some problems have none.” The process of selecting our meal took his mind off Eva, and I sat wondering if he would come back to it. He did, with an evident determination to polish it off for all time. “All I can tell you is: keep your eyes open. Your ears will be filled by your friends. Not long ago, Eva said to me, ‘Can’t you see that his attitude does something to me? I’m not by nature a shrew.’ ‘Who knows?’ I asked her. Have you ever noticed that if you speak personally to her she is startled? I’m no chemist. In the course of my education, I detested chemistry. But I happen to think of it: doesn’t marriage start combinations bubbling in a retort? Correct me if my terms aren’t scientific. Fellows who find out all sorts of things about the stars in connection with our souls, not to mention our intestines, make me faintly sick. Well, then, my dear Dinah, it’s conceivable that Eva’s mother-in-law might be heated in a test tube and never bubble into a poison. See what I mean?”

I admitted that I did not see. “Do you mean that Eva has bubbled into a poisonous person? Because I don’t believe it.”

He studied me, his eyes abstractedly without, on their part, the poison of human emotion. “Why don’t you ask her husband?”

“You are against it, then!”

He dropped into my turmoil “Why discuss this?”

I insisted: “It isn’t idle curiosity on my part.”

He said smoothly that of course it was not.

“She’s so sweet!” I regretted.

“She’s so weak,” he countered. “For all her talk, she lets him bully her. You should have seen him dragging her—all protests, half-way in hysterics—from a dinner given for her, because his mother was giving a reception for her later on and Van Suydam thought it discourteous for them to be absent when the first guests arrived. I mean—it was discourteous: but she’s Eva Litchfield, and some leeway must be allowed her.” He regretted that she did not choose her actions with the taste she displayed in her choice of words. If she behaved with the exquisiteness of her characters, she and her husband would make out. “He is as punctilious as she should be, and doesn’t see that she would truckle at once to a man who hit her a good smacking blow between the eyes. Women like it. Why do you laugh?”

I laughed because once upon a time Eva had said the same thing. She said that the smaller in size the woman the more she speculated about force, the more finical her tastes the stronger her curiosity about brutality. Men, she said, went at it by contraries: they were apt to fight a large woman who dreamed of a knight. I said to him: “Go on? You were saying that he dragged her off by force?”

“In the line of polished pushing. I rather suspect that he gave away his underlying motive in what he said to her as he held her wrap. She had been protesting that what she needed was contact with other writers, and he said: ‘I’m jealous of everything. I’m jealous of the sky that looks down on you. I’m jealous of the air that blows on your cheek.’ I had hopes of him; it occurred to me that, with this line, he might come far enough to really appreciate Eva’s own unerring selection of the right word—unless she’s telling her troubles with him: then, you would be surprised to find out how disgustingly sentimental she is. She told me of some love passages between them. She will of course tell you. But she may tell you other passages, and this was so amusing. She said she went to his study to see if he was angry—she had probably been outrageous to the poor devil—and she said he was put out because she then jumped up from his ardent caresses to answer the telephone. She was genuinely astonished at his irritation. Women act like gadflies: they never let a man alone when he is irritated. She appears to have come back at it, standing and simply smiling. He tried to hold out—must have had some lurking idea of teaching her a lesson; but she assures me that at the touch of her he always loses his head. And when he gasped—silly of him, where it’s a question of Eva—that she must love him always, she merely said that his workroom was so untidy. She told me this because she was scoring a point against him: he had drawn a mark on her brow with a stick of charcoal and said that she could never get away from his brand—that she belonged to him. Being Eva, she took this badly; she said, ‘You can’t shackle my mind! You can’t put your mark on my brain!’ It appears that as they were hotly arguing this, the telephone rang again, and she rushed away to answer it.”

I wailed: “If he doesn’t understand Eva better than to even play at branding her——!”

He said: “I have no use for women in fact, although theoretically I admire the pretty dears. Eva didn’t see, as you don’t see, how amusing it is that for the second time she outraged him by rushing to answer the telephone.”

Side by side on the divan encircling the room, we dropped into bodily comfort; and bodily comfort makes a man talk. At last I protested: everyone, I said, brought it around to Eva’s mother-in-law; was she necessarily so a part of the situation? To be sure, I mused, her immobility would have a disastrous effect on Eva’s nerves. He contradicted me: “Mrs. Van Suydam’s composure is the sum of her sense of what is due her position multiplied by her inflexible will. You’ll find that Eva appreciates her; I’ve always felt that her admiration for the mother had much to do with her falling in love with the son. She met Mrs. Van Suydam at the critical moment. She met her the day the chap asked her to marry him.”

Often his omniscience irritated me. “How can you know?”

“We all know,” he crowed over me. “It happened the day that you, in a spirit of mistaken decency, left a tea at the Savoy Plaza. Never, my dear Dinah, leave a splendid scene because of a feeling for what is right.”

“She seemed a tragic sight,” I put in as my excuse.

“Eva?” He was amused.

I shook my head. “The old lady. She was having a terrible time controlling herself, you know.”

“That’s what made it such a magnificent scene. Those old girls were taught self-control at the proper boarding schools. And when she sees fit she can defend herself. The old lady needs no help from the itinerant author. Oh, I’ve been hanging around her whenever I found an opportunity!” His laugh, seldom heard, was always startling; it was a high, whinnying laugh. “I assure you that she doesn’t feel a whit humbled in presence of our various names and fames. Her pleasure in identifying those of us whose photographs she’s seen appended to book reviews is almost sadistic. She’s long since recovered the balance that you feared to see her throw overboard. She seems to think that our pictures hadn’t prepared her for the truth. Once upon a time, when I was hanging on her words, she said loftily: ‘And who, pray, is that strange woman with a face like a mask?’ She graciously assisted me in identifying the lady with ‘Ah I don’t wonder you are at a loss! They all wear masks, these celebrities.’ The term she so derisively threw at us seemed to taste bad; only her famous self-control prevented her making a face. She was, at the time, attentively regarding a pale poet who looked, if the truth must be told, half drowned, and at Molly Underhill who has, as we know, an eye that is lewd in its open questing. She said ‘Humph! Indeed! All diseased, I fear. It is a disease, this writing of books.’ You’ll notice that she seldom abbreviates her words. There’s nothing slovenly about her.”

The woman with a face like a mask must have been Florence Quincy, I said. Interested in oddities in others, she was herself strange in appearance.

He recovered from the devastation of a fit of laughter and went on with his dissection of Mrs. Van Suydam. “She said to me ‘And which of these ladies and gentlemen are my son’s especial friends?’ This being soon after the marriage I was at a loss: for who among us knew much about him? Who among us, even now, knows much about him? We really agree with Mrs. Van Suydam, who didn’t then, and doesn’t now, recognize a possible bridge between her family and the artists who make the toys with which Van Suydams amuse themselves when so minded. You realize that she must have had some definite plans for her son—that she must have followed the best lines of the dowager tradition and picked out a wife for him? She wanted Gertrude Cuyler, who’s wholesomely without talents, to marry Nicholas. The Cuyler girl was the woman whose eventual stepping into her shoes she could have borne with equanimity. But I hear that his objection to Gertrude was that she insisted too strenuously on the fact of her never feeling ill; while, he is reported to have said, he didn’t admire sickly women, there was a happy mean between bouncing health and a lady’s delicately tenacious hold on life.”

Gertrude Cuyler had never interested us. She laughed too much; and when she laughed her mouth, stretching widely, still failed to suggest true mirth. About this girl who had sighed, at the tea two years ago, there was no hint of mirth, although her frequent laughter showed her to be conscience-stricken by its absence. She was a tall girl with russet hair and the pale skin of the red-headed woman; and over her face there was the warmth of sunshine, and when one looked closely the sunshine was an overlay of small golden freckles. As Glidden had remarked, she was wholesome.

“I mentioned her,” whispered Glidden, “because she happens to be sitting a few tables away.”

Over the shoulder of the man with her, she eyed me. Before the day was over, I was to feel sorry for Gertrude Cuyler. But at the time I glowered because she was only a few tables away.

“Women are so amazing. They know when they’re being talked about—with the exception of Eva,” he amended it. “Eva is sublimely oblivious—most of the time. It’s so lovely to watch a person who is sublimely oblivious.”

Plaintively I begged that he make one plain statement of fact: how did Mrs. Van Suydam feel about her son having married Eva Litchfield?

“You’re so literal!” he lamented. “I’m sure that if Eva hadn’t been the subject of open gossip she would have seemed ordinary to Mrs. Van Suydam; she would have been no more than a very pretty woman whom her son had ‘picked up’ and fallen in love with—foolishly but understandably. But Eva had been ‘talked about’; she was a woman who could, therefore, smear an impious finger over the fair name of the Van Suydams, and the old lady got the wind up. I think she came uptown to that tea, where she knew her son would be and where she suspected Eva would be, in order to bear him off in triumph. It didn’t occur to her that she could fail.”

Here was the clear impression. Mrs. Van Suydam had set out to play her first, and last, card. She would pluck the young man from his circling flight in ether only slightly above, and in sight of, his home; she would bear him off on the rush of her victory. The drive back down Fifth Avenue would be her triumphal progress with the son of her house safe at her side. But as she sat on the sofa at the tea-party could she banish all doubts? Underneath the noise of high chatter there must have flowed for her, rapidly, darkly, the stream of impending defeat. I asked—but already I knew the answer: “She took her son home?”

Charles Glidden smiled. “Didn’t you get the idea? He refused to go with her. He stayed behind to ask Eva Litchfield to marry him. That’s the point, don’t you see?”

II

As I turned the corner into Park Avenue Gertrude Cuyler caught up with me. She was accompanied by the gay Anthony Bloodgood. He had been the man, I saw now, over whose shoulder she had peeped at me in the restaurant a moment since.

“Mrs. Avery,” Gertrude almost gasped, as if she had been running, “you don’t object if we walk along with you? I tried to leave at the same time so that I might have a chance to talk with you,” she explained with her determined honesty. She dropped into step as well as she could with the difference in our heights. In walking she came down heavily, leaning forward as though on the alert to control her feet, and when she stopped it was with almost a dislocation of her body: decidedly, a girl who would be at her best when middle age justified slow dignity.

I glanced up at Anthony Bloodgood and met his embarrassed eyes. He was twisting the ends of his moustache. Gertrude, too, was confused; that she was about to lose her way on a path that she nevertheless chose to follow was revealed by a heavy flush which added nothing to her somewhat robust good looks. I realized that they were bent on talking about Eva’s marriage, and that Anthony at least would never acknowledge that this was by design. He strolled along with his easy grace, in the fashion of young men who from the nursery have been fed and clothed, exercised and mildly entertained, by rule; only his uneasy eyes gave him away. Walking, therefore, between two painfully self-conscious persons, I tried to be jaunty about it, a difficult part to play towards flanking superiority in height.

In the tiny triangle exposed between the edges of a fur coat and a bright scarf, Gertrude’s throat showed convulsed: like an adolescent, she tried to swallow her agitation. She said, pitching herself into speech and being, as always, devastating: “I don’t want you to think we eavesdropped.”

“Eavesdropped?”

“You both spoke loudly,” she explained.

Of course we had; all of us did, becoming more animated as we agreed or disagreed more definitely. I smiled; had she been imaginative, always we must have reminded her of a mob scene on the stage; we must have seemed without direction, to be getting nowhere and, in truth, to be indifferent where we might eventually bring up.

“I know most of you. And naturally I knew what you were talking about,” said Gertrude. And vaguely she fell upon another point. “I don’t know how any of you talk at home.” Her voice was uneasy, and a little shocked. We must have given her an impression of strain, of frustration, of dissatisfaction because of constant striving, of a profound unhappiness because within us she detected no repose—with her, the basis of all happiness. The thing before her must have seemed to be energy engendered by the activity itself, and she would have been very nearly right.

Her nearness to hitting it made my smile sarcastic. “I’m so sorry that I must leave you here. I have some shopping to do.”

She was surprised. She opened her eyes widely. “But I thought we would have a talk, because I heard you say to Mr. Glidden that you were going to walk across to Sutton Place.”

This made me laugh, and I said more amiably: “The truth is, I don’t wish to discuss Eva Litchfield, who is a friend of mine.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Oh, I know that. I know that, Mrs. Avery. But then, you see, Nick is a friend of ours.”

I started to say “Then that should enable you to guess at the character of loyalty,” when, glancing at her, I saw that her blush had faded until her little freckles stood out, seeming to spring from her skin. The girl’s heart lay exposed before my eyes, which I considerately turned away. She said, speaking brightly: “Eva Litchfield is very beautiful.” Her lively tone was a weapon in her defense against me. I wanted to pat her shoulder, and remembered that her shoulder was on a level with the crown of my head and that compassion on tiptoes sports the blemish of inelegance. However, the suspicion that Gertrude Cuyler was pathetic had crept upon me, unawares, and it did no good to remember that Charles Glidden had said to me that I must look out for I was only moved by pathos, which is a weakness of the nerves and slides into bathos.

I bent upon her a strictly impersonal look and told her that beauty was not all of Eva Litchfield. “Besides, what is there about your friend, and my friend, that you should properly talk over with me?”

At this, she gasped that Mrs. Van Suydam was dreadfully worried.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

She said, on an even more dying note: “Eva is so attractive to men!”

During this interchange, Anthony Bloodgood had said not a word. He had marched purposefully along, and if he had glanced above my head at Gertrude I was not aware of it. He now, however, gave me the impression of mutely taking part in the conversation; for I was sure that he did not subscribe to Gertrude’s statement of Eva’s attraction. What was there of finer perception about Nicholas Van Suydam, that he could appreciate Eva Litchfield? Anthony walked with a stubborn set to his broad shoulders and a forward thrust to his powerful neck; and I wondered for how long Eva could stand opposed to this phalanx of the Van Suydams and their kin.

I advanced that I should like to know if Miss Cuyler knew what she was talking about; for how conceivably could she be sure that Mrs. Van Suydam was worried?

“Miss Ingoldsby is my aunt,” she said as if this explained the knottiest problems.

“I still don’t see——” I said. “I’m not, after all, a New Yorker.”

“My aunts are very intimate friends of Mrs. Van Suydam’s; they went to boarding school together, years and years ago,” she expounded as to an idiot. “She talks freely to my aunts. Who else is there for her to talk to about Eva?”

There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted—so, really, a maze of instinct—that it came as a shock to be again accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see, because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened voice.

“Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her, she became confused in her mental processes.

“She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment. “You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.”

I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw, for herself. “Oh, I—I——” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to do it.”

Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van Suydam—she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her—she wanted him to do as the old codgers had always done—settle down to manage the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his little moustache and took a long breath.

Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the island of Manhattan. Eva—and the rest of us—were trying to take root on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or was she forever against her son’s wife?

“How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly.

They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York was accepted by these condemnatory young people—and by their sisters and their cousins and perhaps their aunts—as natural, but it drove us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler.

“Why—no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or—I probably read it when I was a little girl.”

“You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that authors should stay at home. She will, of course—in this case.”

The Cuyler girl asked timidly if the Bible really said such a thing. She was losing the thread of what she had set out to say to me. I could see her fighting to hold on. “All of you make such jokes,” she advanced.

“One must joke,” I threw out carelessly. Especially, I added in my mind, when one is beginning to understand. I cautioned myself: “Old girl, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to understand the two sides; for don’t you always drag in that there are two sides? There’s the side of Eva, and there’s the side of the Van Suydams: there’s the side of us, and there’s the side of New York. You might start—by way of a drastic change!—by understanding yourself. Why—for instance—are you about to be detestable to this good-natured young woman? Is it because you’re envious of her security? She gets that security from having always kept in touch with her home. You could have stayed at home; Eva could have stayed at home: your precious crowd could have stayed at home. Why didn’t you?” There we were: we were transplanted and sickly, and I was turning to bite the hand that fed me.

We paused at a street crossing, and the lights changed, and I felt Anthony Bloodgood’s hand at my elbow symbolically guiding me for the passage of the—Red Sea, I decided in despair: it had become vitally necessary that I laugh. Anthony looked down—very far down—to my face, and enquired solicitously: “Did I rush you too fast?”

“Yes!” I said. But it was the life that I had selected, and not Anthony Bloodgood, which was rushing me too fast. The Lord God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, back to the land from whence they had come. If one read the Bible when one was upset, it applied to the most modern of problems. An author takes colour from the land of his birth, but mainly, it seemed to me today, he derives from the land of his people the calm strength through which he is enabled to go on. I glanced at these two satisfied persons who, because they believed that nothing in the world was so good as New York, had never considered moving away.

Encouraged by my attention, Gertrude hurried on: “Eva has a way of saying to Nick ‘When I work, I work’.”

I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him? Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?” I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick. This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed, at myself and every friend I had in the world.

Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice and—and—yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better leave——”

“Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the breath.

She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony that we had better go——”

Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.”

“I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?”

“He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep disgust.

“She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded.

Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear a word you say.”

“She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature of mist and cobwebs, an—” I hesitated before their blankness—“an enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells bring about.”

Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”

“I wasn’t here,” I said drily; “but presumably she was in love with him.”

I knew that this time they did look at each other over my head. I heard them breathe their doubt. Anthony brought up a feature that he assured me would drive any man mad: she was not consistent. He had been in Nicholas’ own workroom, he told me, sitting idly by while another man discussed points of architecture with their host. Anthony acknowledged to having been bored, and floundering out of his depth which, he said, was not in the line of architecture; but men respected each other’s work, and he had of course kept quiet until they settled whatever had come up. But Eva had opened the door and had stood there until they were forced to look up from the plans spread out before them. Was that nice of her, he asked me: was that as she would be done by?

I remarked that she might have wanted to see him about something that could not wait. I added the nugget, for Gertrude to seize, that Eva had much ado to keep out of the way of men’s admiration; she had had, I explained, to fight for the time in which to work.

“Now, Mrs. Avery—” Anthony began to explain—“I didn’t mean— Of course she had something to see him about. She told Nick that the Wickershams had telephoned for them to come around after dinner and talk.”

I looked sharply at him. But his face was blank. Tugging at his little moustache, he gazed down on me with honest good nature. “Oh, well! What then?”

He resumed: “Nick said ‘Why?’ I wish you could have seen how surprised she was! ‘To talk, of course,’ she said. And he said ‘What’s the use of that?’ And that was when I fancied that Gertie was right and that they were about to blow up. The funny thing is, that you can understand every word she says when she’s rattling like machine gun fire. She began to say, over and over like a mechanical doll, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ She told him flatly that she was a public character and owed a duty to society—to show up, I took it she meant. And she called poor old Nick’s attention to the fact that it didn’t matter whether or not he showed up in public, because no one knew who put up a building.”

“Where was the other man while this went on?” I wanted to know. The other man had taken a hasty departure. Then, I remarked, they should have followed his excellent example.

He stopped pulling his moustache. He explained lamely that he had feared such a course would dignify the scene into a serious affair. “A sort of reflection on Eva,” he concluded.

“Oh, nonsense!” I cried. “What is the matter with you people? Is he to be allowed to say what he pleases and she to be muzzled?”

The rock of Manhattan reared itself between us. “You don’t understand, then,” he said. He left it at that.

Gertrude took it up where he left it. “She is so fond of parties,” she criticized.

I said: “Now, look here—be reasonable. Be fair—if you can, to Eva. Aren’t you fond of parties?”

Gertrude reverted to her mother’s time. “She’s married!” She was stolidly virtuous over it, but she came back to what personally she turned the flat of her hand against. “And Nick is bored to death at those literary teas.”

I snapped: “How do you know he is?”

She stammered that she went to these teas herself, when invited. I saw that she went to look at Nicholas who went to look at Eva. I sighed for Eva: the phalanx was unbroken. She pretended to be drawn off the subject by one of our necessary ventures at street intersections, and I could not decide whether her immediate return to it was bravery or the tenacity which would finally dash out her moth life. She stated: “Nick detests the sort of person who hangs around Eva at those parties.”

“Aha!” I sniffed. “Considering that they are distinguished men and women——”

Pushed into a corner, she brought out what she had been driving at during the length of our stroll. “He dislikes Spencer Mapes.”

“He tells you these things against his wife?”

She was quick in his defense. “His mother told me. At the tea—you were talking about the tea at luncheon, Mrs. Avery—his mother saw Mr. Mapes for the first time; and I’m sure she has never stopped worrying about him since. Tony was looking for Nick—although he wasn’t really looking because we knew that he and Eva were talking. And Mrs. Van Suydam said to me ‘Who is that youngish man with the dark face who seems to be in expectation of something from the room beyond?’” She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Mr. Mapes was waiting for Eva. Everyone knew that, except Mrs. Van Suydam.”

I saw the implacable lady sitting on her sofa without the feminine relief of tapping her foot on the floor and speculating about Spencer Mapes as he waited for Eva and Nicholas, saying to her heart that it was far-fetched to believe that he waited for Nicholas but knowing in spite of herself that he waited for something inimical to Nicholas. She must have said to herself: “But this is an enemy!” And she probably said aloud, surprised that the incident of discovering him had affected her voice: “Who is that?” She would have given full weight to each of her three words. Gertrude Cuyler was without the dramatic sense, and had used a more involved phraseology than Mrs. Van Suydam under the circumstances would have employed.

I regarded Gertrude with a quickened interest: was love, then, such a stimulus that she was becoming perceptive? For she said now: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Avery, for repeating it—but Mrs. Van Suydam said something else. She said that she had always fancied artists were weak creatures, and that she was now afraid that Nick was weaker than his new friends. This was what frightened her, I suspect.” But her thoughts becoming confused, she gave her little gasp and started again. “She said that in Eva’s friends she seemed to have discovered a toughness of fibre, a tenacity of aim, and the will to succeed. This was what frightened her, I think,” she wound up.

Anthony Bloodgood was surprised. He expostulated with Gertrude: “I didn’t know she felt that way about that bounder Mapes. How could he affect her? It seemed to me that it was Eva who knocked her breath out. I remember I came up and told her that Nick was coming. I explained that he hadn’t known she was there because he was talking to Eva Litchfield. And she looked dashed, to me. I mean, the name, Eva Litchfield, seemed to do something to her. I give you my word, she almost jumped!”

They disputed above my head, leaving me free to do the thing that all along I had known I would do: I began attributing to Mrs. Van Suydam those reactions that she should have felt and that I was sure she had felt in the depths of her bosom so decently restricted by its buckram and black silk. The name, Eva Litchfield, tolling in her head when the young man had ceased speaking, must have drawn together into a design all her premonitions of disaster. This triumphant name took possession of her imagination, seemed, at once, to become part of her life because it menaced her son. So strong must this feeling have been—so swayed by it must she instantly have become—that the garish reception rooms might have darkened. I was sure that she felt old, and helpless, in face of this victorious name. She must have closed her eyes, in her temporary weakness, before opening them to gaze profoundly at her son. In my game of visualizing this fragmentary story, I said to myself: What a gorgeous scene! In her son’s bright blue eyes she must have seen what she had always seen in their sparkling depths, belief that life would be good to him. Sure that his mother adored him—sure that the girl walking beside him was the most exquisite creature in the world—convinced, as every man has been convinced at one time, that the two women he loved would love each other—Nicholas must almost have hurried in his eagerness to bring them together. But his mother’s mind, leaping beyond this appeal, fastened upon Spencer Mapes’ looming fixed regard. She sat, therefore, upon her sofa composed to all outward seeming, smiling at her son and his companion and meeting the eyes of neither; for she was engaged in her duel with Spencer Mapes.

Gertrude, who was watching me out of the tail of her eye, advanced tentatively: “Nick’s so fond of his mother. I heard him saying to Eva—at that same tea——”

I shut my ears to what Nicholas had actually said in favour of what he should have said. Holding Eva’s arm, urging her forward, his own eyes without reservation in his complete reliance on his mother’s devotion, “See!” he must almost have boasted. “Here is my mother!” I had no doubt that what he said was “Hello! How did you get here?” This was what Gertrude quoted—maybe: I did not listen; she was incapable of reaching out beyond five-finger exercises. But she told me fairly: “Eva was lovely about it. She said to Nick ‘But she’s splendid! She’s splendid!’”

It would have been a matter of indifference to Mrs. Van Suydam that Eva, seeming to shrink, to become in a moment blighted by this calculated inattention, had still fixed on the older woman eyes that expanded for a sight that charmed her. “Did Mrs. Van Suydam look at Eva through that lorgnette?” I asked.

Gertrude’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

I knew that she would have put up her lorgnette that she might not be scorched by the flame of an approaching passion. I said: “Ah poor Eva!” Behind those glasses, narrowly but covertly, she would have inspected Eva. But on Eva’s bloodless little face, in her clear eyes, there would have been no flame; there would have been, as always under a challenge, only assertion of herself, only belief in herself. I was, suddenly, very wearied and said firmly: “This is a footless discussion. And here’s my street. Goodbye.” I extended a resolute hand and marched down a side street.

But floating helplessly after me came Gertrude Cuyler’s pleading voice: “Won’t you do something about it?”

III

Florence Quincy was a tall woman so blonde as to be almost albino. She had a large mouth which she made up to suggest danger; it became, under her lavish use of vermilion lip-stick, a fixed and sullen sneer. She wound her flaxen hair closely, and even in the house she usually wore a turban, also closely wound. These turbans ranged from the richest materials to her beige stockings, which one day we caught her twining and pinning into shape. “Nothing else in the place that exactly matched the shade of my frock,” she explained. Her eyes were greenish and grey and almost blue. The amusing negroid suggestion of her features lay in a certain drooping heaviness, and was contradicted by a positive hint of the equine. She had—in short—a face that could not be easily forgotten.

She sat looking into the fire. Spencer Mapes hung over her although he was seated beside her on the club fender; he always seemed to be a cloud descending on the earth and undecided when to smite with his thunderbolt. As I came in he was saying, with his nice mingling of wistful regret and detached cruelty: “Her spirit is too rare, isn’t it, for the things that help you and me to do her the least good? Life hurts her. And, if we grant this, can we censure her for what she may do—for what, I might say, I’m confident she’s planning to do?”

I said: “Poor Eva! For of course you are talking about Eva?”

“Precisely what I was saying,” he admitted. “Poor Eva was led astray by her admirations. She fancied that she would be happy because of the exclusiveness of the Van Suydams. In Eva’s eyes, exclusiveness is a beauty; she goes everywhere because she enjoys making an impression, she runs with everyone because she wants to hear what they say about her, and she would love to hate it all.”

As I suspected this to be profoundly true, I said: “I don’t agree with you.”

“After all,” he said to this, “you’ve just got back. Wait until you’ve picked up the threads.”

I shrugged it off with “At this rate, I’ll know all by the end of the day.”

The house boasted the dimmest corners in town. From one of these umbrageous retreats came Winnie Conant and James Pomeroy to greet the cocktails. The dapperness of Pomeroy at once permeated the room. He had a childlike smile and hinting laughter. When he spoke his mouth pursed into the semblance of a kiss, and his words were the more startling because under their caressing there was no kiss. His remarks were listened to because if one did not hear what he said one would be tormented over a suspicion that he had said it at one’s expense. The fact that he poked fun in his friends’ faces made it no more comfortable to brood over what he might have said upon the occasions when one did not listen. His face, even when flushed with laughter, conveyed an elegance, his enunciation a nicety, as flexible as his mind. He said: “But—Dinah darling!—of course you realize that Eva would be immensely pleased, if she knew how much we talk about her.”

I admitted that she would not resent the quantity of the talk, but I speculated as to whether she would like the quality of it. “I mean this: since I landed this morning I’ve heard talk about Eva on all sides, from every source, and with various interpretations put upon her simplest act. Now, there’s something I want to know: why?”

Winnie Conant said simply: “It’s on account of her marriage.” Winnie wrote juveniles. She had the lightness of fancy that children adored. She had no children of her own, did not want them, and in fact had no use for the budding mind. But with those who had never met her she was a by-word for her sweet motherliness. She lived with her husband, Addis Wickersham, in Macdougal Alley—why, no one knew, but we suspected that Addis had nowhere else found a library sufficiently vast for his books. “You know how Eva comes into a room—gorgeously dressed when she knows it isn’t a formal party?”

I argued that she had always done this; her marriage could have worked differences, but her love of fine raiment was her own. “She dresses for her own satisfaction; she takes a narcissus-like joy in being a picture.”

Winnie’s surprise at this was genuine. “I hadn’t expected you to be the one to call her a narcissist. Well, anyway, the effect of her entrances is more shattering than ever now she has her husband at heel. And how on earth can we talk, when he’s around? I’ll just tell you: you might as well see how things are going; and one party that that man’s presence spoils is like any other that he puts an end to. They don’t live so far from us, and every now and then they drop in after dinner. There are people at our place, usually, as you may remember. Well, anyway, one evening Eva sailed in looking like a Botticelli virgin in cloth-of-gold. Only—she was brittle. You know how she gets? She gives the impression, when in that mood, of choosing her words with care—as if they were going to the printer. Her husband followed her in; and he was laughing. It’s unusual, to catch Nicholas Van Suydam enjoying a good laugh when he’s with any of us. He wasn’t dressed, by the way; said she’d taken him by surprise with her ball costume. And, Dinah, doesn’t that one thing show how little he knows her? Anyway, she told me what he had said on the way to us. You know, of course, that if you get Eva at the right moment there’s nothing she won’t tell? He had reminded her that these studios used to be the stables belonging to his mother’s neighbours. And she had said it had atmosphere. He had come back at her with the reminder that that stiff and starched old coachman of his mother’s lives above his mother’s stable, which, as it happens, is two doors from us in the Alley. And, she said, she stamped her foot at him and remarked that he couldn’t make her lose her temper, because she simply adored his mother’s old-fashioned ways. She said that the old lady is a real literary character. ‘Good lord!’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. Eva actually does admire that old woman. She said to him that his mother was a literary remains, that she had never seen anything like her, that she was an anachronism. She wound up by thanking her stars that she’d found such a thing in New York, of all places. And that’s when he again rolled his eyes and said ‘Good lord! She is New York!’”

I waited to see if anyone else would comment. They did not; they had heard it before. So I put it to Winnie that I had got no impression of a scene in what she had told.

Winnie finished her cocktail in such haste that she was further delayed by a fit of choking. With a flap of her hand she begged me to wait a minute; she was coming to it. With the further flourish of her now empty glass she might have been dashing her challenge into the face of Eva’s defiant husband. “It seems that he made fun of our two names—Addis’ and mine—over our front doorbell. It seems that it’s a bone of contention between them that on her books Eva still uses her maiden name alone.”

Florence the unmarried smiled. “Why do you suppose Eva told you?” she speculated.

Winnie gloated over the fact that, so she said, one could always get things out of Eva. “And how can you take him, after all—that husband of hers? He’s made no attempt to fit into the circle of Eva’s friends. Eva told us that he said he believed marriage should be an abdication of this willingness to listen to the advice of friends. I do think,” Winnie exclaimed, “that smoking a pipe gives a man an advantage over us; and they know it, the nasty things! Nicholas Van Suydam stretched out his long legs and leaned back and clenched that pipe stem between his teeth and grinned at us; and when I asked point-blank what was on his mind he mumbled around the filthy pipe that he’d been saying to himself ‘My man, if ever there was a time in your life when you had better sit tight, this is it!’”

“Ah splendid!” murmured Pomeroy.

Winnie pushed her complaint. Eva, it seems, had said briskly “Nick darling, we’ve got to get used to things. And hadn’t we better start in by making up our minds to let each other’s work alone?”

I drawled: “I think he sounds rather attractive.”

“Oh well,” Winnie advanced uneasily, “I acknowledge that we were talking about Eva’s affairs.”

“With both of them present—of course?”

“Eva didn’t object,” said Winnie with relief. “You know her. Spence came in about that time, and said—you know, Spence, you can be counted on to say it!—that she was something-or-other-delicate and rare, and she positively purred. She was taken by the idea of having attributed to her an unapproachable perfection.”

Spencer Mapes said: “How do you know I don’t believe it?”

New York has a sliding scale of hours for cocktails. It was still early in the afternoon, although candles were lit in the neighbours’ living-rooms. The soft light of these numerous candles streamed through the windows on to the trees outside; for this row of houses had been remodelled and now faced the river. The branches of the trees leaned towards the windows, and almost brushed the panes, and where they came within the candlelight they were tipped with gold so beckoning as to be unearthly. The river ran at the foot of the garden, separating it from Welfare Island where recalcitrant women saw the error of their ways; and lights began flaring from the windows of the prison, for the sun, if one could have seen it, had moved over the Hudson. There would have been peace except for this suggestion of imprisoned suffering, and quiet except for the radios. The loud speakers of other people’s radios held New York in a deadened thrall. Our small company of necessity raised their voices, and above what we said rolled and bellowed what persons from all America said. Words clacked against our eardrums, songs assailed our taste; and this discordance so persistently knocked against me—as if someone were hitting me—that I wondered for how long a time I could hold out. I wanted to scream.

They were saying things—as people on the air were saying things—useless things. Florence said: “The only good thing about him is that he can make no use in his buildings of what I may chance to say in his hearing. I mean—it doesn’t pay to run around town saying absolutely good things; the first you know, you read your good things in other people’s books. That—” she concluded with her smile that directed her barbs to all in the room—“that is the reason authors are so stupid in conversation.”

“Meaning—?” suggested Pomeroy with interest.

“—That I may be planning a brilliant line on Eva’s husband. He irritates me.”

Pomeroy said: “I adore his mother. And let me tell you that men have adored old ladies for less worthy reasons than mine for my passion for Mrs. Van Suydam. She tells me that she’s disappointed in Eva’s books because they haven’t the rich meaty flavour of Moll Flanders. She’s added to the rich meaty flavour of my life. You should talk to her, Dinah.”

Everyone then told me what I should do. Florence said: “I tell you frankly, Dinah, that knowing your influence over Eva I felt sure you’d want to do something about it and asked you here in order to decide on something.” My influence over Eva being a new idea, and the last thing they would have acknowledged if they had believed it, she flung at me a guarded look. They felt, she said now, that I would see the seriousness of the situation so soon as they had fully gone into it with me.

“And then?” I prompted.

Florence shrugged. She said that she was making no suggestions; for, after all, how could she? She held to the notion that for Eva a divorce would be a disastrous thing. “But she’ll ditch herself yet,” she thought.

“Look here, my girl,” I called myself to account, “why can’t you make up your mind that an American is never happy? We’re a chronically dissatisfied race. You know that if any of us were happy we’d lose our celebrated feverish energy—we’d not be forced by a substratum of uneasiness to push ourselves—push, push, push ourselves—to an end that often we can’t see. It’s our dissatisfaction with life that makes us push. It isn’t going to injure Eva’s work, that she’s unhappily married—if she is.”

Pomeroy announced that I had been talking to myself for the last five minutes. “Have you ever thought, Dinah darling, of using yourself in a novel? But of course you wouldn’t use what really counts; no woman would.”

I said: “Shall we stop this? I’m sick and tired of talking about Eva.”

“My lamb,” interrupted Florence, “wouldn’t it be honest if we acknowledged that these days we get together solely to talk about her? And wouldn’t it be more open and above board if you acknowledged that you eat it up? For my part, I’m frank in my avidity. And I want to say, just here, that I know what Eva herself wants; above and beyond being talked about whenever men—and women—are gathered together in her name, she wants the greatest joy ever experienced by a human being, only, in order that she be not shocked, it must be the joy of creatures without bodies.”

Mapes stood at the window tapping on the panes his own reply to the beckon of the bare branches that mournfully swung in the wind from the river. He said, speaking over his shoulder as if he concealed his face: “She can’t help it. She’s powerless to change her nature—as are we all. Women with thin treble voices have no power of emotion.”

Pomeroy revelled in arguments about the nature of women. “What, then, keeps them going?”

“Their excited nerves.” Thus charitably excusing all possible charges against Eva’s treatment of her husband, Mapes at the same time suggested that this treatment was of a refined cruelty. With anticipatory relish, he glanced keenly from one to another of us, gathering up obscure reactions he might have brought about. I knew that he studied us, measuring our relatively tense muscles as indications of how we had drifted since his suggestion which might embrace so many. I noticed that the cocktail shaker made a swift round of the room. I said that I was tired. “It’s all too much. I can sort out some points, but not so many. Everyone of you has a different impression of everyone of—of—suppose we call them Eva and her opponents? And what you’ve been half-way telling is as jumbled as that statement of mine, and my mind is as jumbled as my statement, and—there you are!”

“Pray for strength,” Pomeroy advised me. “For this is nothing to how you’ll feel when Eva gets at you with her own inner secret side of it.”

They shouted at me that they had been right in assuming that Eva would have no objection to being dissected by us. And, advancing her apology for Eva more tentatively than was her habit, Florence took it up. “Sit down, Dinah,” she begged. “I’m not going to abuse Eva. And, incidentally, I don’t acknowledge the justice of your attitude of holier than thou. You can’t deny several points. You can’t deny that you never get on your ear until after you’ve heard all we have to tell you: and you can’t deny that Eva herself in her distastes is almost inhumane. She’s harsh in her condemnations of what life has brought out in others. And I think that part of the trouble now is that she’s afraid of the effects of life on herself if she lets go and turns human.” Leaning over in her favourite position, her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands, she stared into the fire with her sullen resentment against something that only she knew. The long, racy lines of her figure were so much lovelier than her face that at the moment Florence presented her greatest contradiction. “She’s harried—like a poor wild thing—and I, for one, am sorry for her. But to hell with it! Why should I worry myself?” When Florence cursed it was in a curiously deadened voice that carried her ultimate conviction. She continued to worry herself, of course. “Spence says—but I have my reason for stating that he doesn’t think it—that her fastidiousness is lack of feeling. It’s all in her head, he holds. And because she happens to have a thinnish voice he puts that, too, down to a thinness of temperament. And I don’t believe a word of it. To docket a woman isn’t so easy as all that.” She paused to smile at Mapes. “Don’t be ashamed of being in love with Eva, Spence. You’re a bloodless radish, and for you to so plunge into the maelstrom of human failings is a comfort to your friends. Wasn’t radish,” she mused, “what Eva’s husband called all you men? She told us about it—remember?”

Mapes was disdainful. “Of course he selected the wrong simile. He meant to say turnip. And if you want to recall what Eva told us, how about that bit to the effect that he said he’d see everything once, and her counter remark that her friends were never guilty of triteness? I seem to recall her repeating a quite long and fiery speech she made to him, in which she said that of course he was splendid in his own line but that we weren’t tolerant of platitudes. Which all of you might bear in mind, as it would be sad to fall below Eva’s praise.”

Florence’s mouth seemed to tear her face when she laughed, as she did now, with complete abandonment. “Add to that the one excruciating comment on us that Van Suydam has been known to make. He said—according to Eva—‘Then it’s a labour union, and I’m a scab and liable to get hurt?’ Eva said she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the way to wherever they were going. Eva, poor devil, doesn’t think it amusing that she tells us these things.” One would have taken her for a different woman from the brooding replica of the antique who so short a while ago had sat looking at who knows what in the fire.

I wanted to know, I said, what it all came down to.

It appeared, then, that upon several occasions Eva had attempted what amounted to explanations, or apologies, Florence reported. “She says, in extenuation of her irritation with him, that her husband has a trick of being verbally frolicsome, and it upsets her. Yet she was upset when, in the days immediately following their marriage, he insisted on making love to her whenever he caught sight of her. She told us, at the time, that the love-making made her fractious because it got in the way of her work. The truth is, she wants him to be always on tap, in a way of speaking: ready to follow her lead, turning on the flow of his adoration and turning it off as she indicates. But mainly, I believe, she objects to his being mentally frolicsome about things that she has said and done. She has a curious lack of all sense of proportion.” She meditated, again staring into the fire. “Do you know, Dinah, I think you won’t find her changed in any particular by this experiment. He—Van Suydam—is himself doing all the changing.”

I said that I took this absence of change in Eva for granted. “She has, absolutely, the correct objectiveness of the creative worker.”

“She has nothing of the sort. She worries all the time over her association with her husband,” rejoined Florence.

Spencer Mapes was once more at the window, tapping on the panes in a maddening way.

“Florence, dearest,” chuckled Pomeroy, “it’s so amazing that none of you see it! She knows that she’s a personage. Her peculiar charm would be spoiled if she were humorous about herself. She knows that her part is to skim through life like a bird, or to hang on the wall like a picture.”

Florence, however, was not light-hearted about it. “What Eva needs—what we all need, and what Nicholas Van Suydam has—is the feeling of family life, our own family life, just around the corner to walk in on any minute we feel the need of its spiritual boost. Mark my words: it won’t be Van Suydam who will smash in the end. He’ll change, but he won’t smash up for once and all. He doesn’t have to take a train to go home; he can put out his hand and touch it.”

This was disturbing: because I did not wish to believe those things which I did believe. “You think, then, that we’d all be better off at home?”

Her mouth stretched like a wound. “I don’t think it; I know it. But I shall stay, as all of us will stay.”

We were soap-bubbles, blown forward by winds that reached New York: no balance because we brought with us no weight of soil: no direction beyond that of the winds blowing towards New York: “You think that, too, Florence?”

Florence’s mirthless smile dominated us. “I think a lot of things, and the trouble is that my point of view shifts. I think a different thing each time I speak of it. What a crazy mess! No conviction about any of us—except in the case of Eva. She, God knows, has the supreme conviction—about herself. And she doesn’t let us forget it. A conviction as strong as hers must be uncomfortable to live with. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise to find myself sorry for the poor wretch who married her.”

I sighed with exasperation. “I’d give a lot to know what you really think. After all, I am trying to form a conclusion.”

Florence’s dead white face, which by right should have revealed no emotion and which hung out like a flag every twinge of her heart, now set into her noncommittal smile of a wry amusement that she would share with no one. “Look out, Dinah! You are going to be let down. Eva hasn’t a ‘story’ because her life has always been higgledy-piggledy.” I realized that she had discovered something on me only to discount it, and laughed. But for a moment, peering out from behind her powder, there was her complete disillusionment. “Oh, yes, my dear! I did say that she, of us all, has conviction and knows where she’s going; and still I say that her life is higgledy-piggledy. Work it out, darling!”

IV

I left Florence Quincy’s cautioning myself that i had come back to do a particular thing: the particular book was planned and waiting for tranquillity in order to be written. But already New York pounded on the door of my mind. New York teased that tomorrow would be time enough for work; today, if I knew what was what, should be given up to talk. And talk—until I had heard all that they had to say—would consist of fragmentary information about Eva Litchfield’s marriage. I had growled to Florence that I wondered why I had come back; and she had jeered that we had come here of our own free will, and that we all came back and would try to come back from the grave. It was true. New York is a contagious disease.

I hurried home to be ready when Molly Underhill should call for me.

I waited for her: one always waited for her: and eventually I forgot that I expected her. It took a great deal to erase Molly Underhill from a nervous woman’s consciousness. In this case, the great deal was the voice of the streets, which might be bellowing a threat to the creature leaning from a balcony thirty storeys above the sidewalk. The creature chid herself: “What business of yours is the growth of New York? You’re a small-sized widow-woman who had deliberately come back: now put up with it.” I had informed Florence Quincy’s guests that I had come back to discover what my friends were doing, who they were doing up brown, and what they would do to me. That they were briskly up to something I did not doubt; New York lends a spurious energy to those who stay long enough and not too long. We had rushed in from all sections of the country, to conquer the metropolis if it did not kill us first. It was growing faster than were we.

Gazing at a sky-line still largely composed of the bare steel ribs of buildings that tomorrow would be completed, this newest New York seemed, suddenly and devastatingly, an entity too powerful to cope with. My head swam from the immensity of this conception of a city. Here were buildings striving titanically to reach the skies, and a people battling to preserve an individuality already dwarfed by their own vast feats of masonry; and this mass of the structures erected by themselves was so mighty, this monster born of their ambition was so ruthless in its demands that they keep up with it, that these constructive pigmies would be terrified if the hurry of their existence did not sweep them irresistibly on. Seen from the height where I clung bewildered, they crawled like insects through the streets. The confused roar of their activities, and of the machinery set in motion by their intelligence, came up to me in a paean of praise of themselves. But these people who, thus defeated by their fate, rushed madly along the sidewalks, these poor things who, believing they held their heads proudly, lived their apology to the buildings that they themselves achieved, these victims maddened by their selected careers: even these beings might occasionally pause and listen to a silence. For at intervals there fell upon the dreadful bellow of the traffic a hush so profound that it was as if the hand of God had lifted in warning.

No need for me to remind myself that I was being melodramatic. I was frightened. Noise, to me, has always seemed a personal threat. My nerves rasped by the roar, my thoughts confused by the silences falling with the change of traffic lights, I would not have been surprised if on the now flaming sky the finger of doom had written. Against which of us would the finger trace its denunciation? I qualified my self-arraignment: I was becoming absurd. We could only be hurt by people and, mainly, by ourselves.

For a moment of glory, the city was bathed in a sanguine light. The sunset withdrew through the cross streets and left behind chasms spangled with lamps. But on the tops of the buildings, lingeringly, the ruddy light still frolicked; it might be the soul of New York playing with destruction, bantering ruin. This optimism sparkled on the towers, and glinted down towards the pavements and never reached the ground, and in the end, possibly, forgot that underneath the city there lay the earth itself. The land, foundation for this jubilance over the possibilities of man, might not exist. It was never seen. Before leaving for my temporary residence in France, I had said to Eva Litchfield that they were covering up the earth, and how, I asked, without the feel of the land under his feet could the New Yorker of the future write? She had replied, characteristically, that one could write with passion of England, for instance, if one came from Oshkosh where they make the trunks with the red bands around their middles. Intermittently, Eva liked New York. She had concluded her correction of my notion with the statement: “I’m frightened by nothing in the way of a town, a place. I’m only afraid of the things that men do to our spirits.” I decided to say to her, when I should see her: “It would be the right thing to hang one’s spirit so high that it can’t be reached: New York has the idea.” I would tell her about the soul of New York playing fitfully on the tops of the new tall buildings; and she would, of course, laugh at me as a dabbler in spiritualism. And Winnie Conant, with her aggravating tendency to manage the affairs of those few whom she liked—while she liked them: she would squawk with mirth and tell me to banish fear and adjust myself to grandeur. Winnie would say that some cities have souls, but that New York has strength for the struggle against the gods; her breath is vigour, her noise vitality, her every aspect that of superhuman effort; she is a lusty flout to the world, and often she taunts her own: who cares? Not those who are worthy of New York—would declare Winnie, who came here from Maine.

I must have stayed out on the balcony for a long time—I had watched the sky darken and the lights of late workers prick in until each office building was a paper cut-out—and my excitement might have been the effect of the cold that had penetrated my heavy coat. The jingling of the telephone broke a spell.

“Mrs. Underhill calling for Mrs. Avery, and she says will you please hurry as it’s very late?” came parrot-like from the hotel desk.

“I must say,” remarked Molly as I stepped into her taxi, “that if I’d realized you had located in such an inaccessible place I’d never have come by for you. Do you realize that I’ve wandered for hours?” But the meter did not bear her out. “Now—” she leaned back, and put her feet up on the folding seat, and lit a cigarette—“now we’ll talk over Eva Litchfield’s affairs.” She paid no attention to my possibly antagonistic reaction; the talk was the thing. And with Molly talk was a matter of personalities. She prated on aesthetics and told the baldest facts. The grunt that she now gave might have come from the lurching of the taxi, but I wondered if she did not derive a porcine joy from rooting and snuffling into private lives.

She had an uncanny way of reading minds which were being withheld from her. She said that she had a cold in her head. “Have you forgotten that no one can avoid colds in the head, in New York in the winter? It’s a feature of the brilliancy of the season.” Her nose was red.

The clangour of the traffic and the clack of her voice served to bring home to me that in counting on preserving my acquired attitude of detachment I had reckoned without the tentacles which now tightened around me. During our progression through the streets, our hitching starts and violent halts, our series of back-breaking jolts—the experience, I was to rediscover, of getting anywhere in town—and during the resulting nervous exasperation over what no one can remedy since they have built this city, I might have been shaking, stretching, straining to encompass the changes into which by easy stages my friends had slipped without shock.

She screamed persistent confidences above the din. Some of what she told me reached my ears and some escaped me, and it was only significant because it impressed me with the fact that I was again a member in good standing of a racket. I was not interested in what she told, for, in spite of her proposed plan of revelation in which she was to concentrate on Eva Litchfield, she told shattering details of the love life of persons with whom I had the barest acquaintance. And I had been away for so long that even the activities of my old friends had faded into the background of the trivial.

But she finally got around to it: she always did. She asked if I had seen Eva during the past summer, which she had spent in Europe.

I had not seen Eva since I had gone abroad. But it is not unethical to lie to another woman. I said—unnecessarily, for Eva was always shiningly beautiful: “She made a great sensation.”

Molly’s eyes shifted, on this. “Then you must have seen that something was wrong? And what sort of sensation do you mean?”

I said cheerfully: “Oh, in the way of her appearance, and also in the way of her books, which you must acknowledge one wouldn’t expect from so lovely a woman. London takes the position that they are fine enough to have been written by an ugly woman.”

Eva’s beauty was a slap in Molly’s face, her genius an affront to the lesser gift. She preserved a dashed silence. In the obscurity of the taxi I felt that she waited to spring. “It’s a fortunate thing that you and I didn’t start life as beauties,” she eventually assured me. “I’ve always thought, Dinah, that you don’t fit together. Have you ever noticed that your face isn’t the type that should go with your body—if nature happened to be squeamish, which she isn’t?” She then discounted my amusement. “No use in saying what you were thinking of saying. I know I’m a wreck. It’s only Eva who can work like a slave, and live on a tension, and come out of it looking like an angel.”

Eva had, always, looked like an angel. Gossip, sticking to her like pitch, had not spoiled the loveliness of her face. The one woman among us whose love affairs were front page news, shrinking from it, hating it, and always adding to it, there was about Eva a helplessness that made me rush to her defense. I said, now, staring Molly in the eye: “You’ve been insinuating, and have told nothing—which, after all, I remember to be characteristic of you. Come out with it.”

“My dear!” she protested. “I’m as crazy over her as you are. How can you think I was going to tell something against her?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell her what you say.”

“My love, what a spitfire you’ve become,” she said sweetly. She insisted that she knew nothing definite, that Eva was in no trouble, that, in short, the real trouble had fallen upon her friends; they found it difficult to keep the peace with her new husband, who was an unacceptable nuisance. “It’s a pity,” she commented, “that men no longer beat their wives; so much the most potent means of displaying connubial disapproval—and so much pleasanter for the casual guest, who doesn’t often find himself present during the performance.”

We had reached our destination, and stood with basement steps backing us and an iron grille forbiddingly confronting us; and in the flickering light from the lantern that threw over the speakeasy entrance the disguise of the picturesque, Molly’s long eyes shone like a wolf’s. The usual reserved orb peered at us through the locked grating; the customary smile greeted us upon our eventual admission; we scuttled the length of the narrow hallway to the rear of the house, squeezing past a fat policeman who lounged inside the barroom door and feelingly averted his gaze. The bar was crowded with our friends, our enemies, and those who had not yet made up their minds about us. They suspended the interchange of their code words, their juggling with words, and Molly seemed gratified at their silence and flattered by the affronted stares directed at her by those whose books she had recently reviewed. A book must be more or less open to ridicule in order to be reviewed by Molly Underhill. I thought: “How strange it is, that I didn’t notice silence, abroad.” But a different language is a barrier and at the same time a protection: if one speaks it, one is still guarded, by its ultimate strangeness, from too close an encroachment. As never in New York, one’s thoughts remain inviolably one’s own.

A fat Italian stood before us, beaming professionally. “Mrs. Avery! And Miss Underhill! But how sad it is to see you here without Miss Litchfield!”

“What did I tell you?” demanded Molly’s lifted eyebrows.

Whatever she intended telling me—and I doubted her ability, if not her willingness, to tell me anything definite about Eva Litchfield—was broken into by the approach of Winnie Conant and her husband, Addis Wickersham. Winnie gushed “Again we meet!” but plainly made mental reservations as to the benefit to New York of my return. In her torrent of words she contrived to nicely mingle sly digs at Eva with encomiums on the proprietor of the speakeasy. “What with living expenses being beyond reason, where would we be without him to cash our checks which we’ve no means of knowing to be good, to give us credit when checks are out of the question——” Having done her duty to the amenities, she fixed me with her glitter. “As I tried to tell you this afternoon—only Florence talks so much——” She went on to inform me that Nicholas Van Suydam was patently destined to ruin Eva’s career. “Such a shame, for a brilliant novelist, as Eva is now acknowledged to be——”

I received, squarely between the eyes, Molly’s glance. She enquired, but not as if she solely wished to give Eva her dues: “Does anyone deny that she’s outstripped all of you?”

Here, then, were two women who had it in for Eva. Winnie purred that it was not as if Eva had been starved for love; and laughed riotously, and administered a visual dig to her own husband. What can be expected of the husband of a jealous wife, besides a certain hint of duplicity? In the case of Addis Wickersham, this tinge of deceit was so blended with the suggestion thrown out by his sonorous voice, which rolled like an organ and, like an organ, seemed always to be accompanying the praise of God, that the impression left upon the listener was that of a man who was all but grandly noble. He might have been a great biographer; but he talked it out, he talked himself out, he talked not only his own ideas but the world itself into a frazzle from which nothing could be salvaged. His one passion was talk—his talk. He gave the impression of listening to his words with rapture; and his joy in the achievements of his larynx was so intense that in its glow his approbation of the content of his remarks dropped out of sight. He intoned. For minutes after he had lapsed into mute satisfaction the room would vibrate with the sound waves he had released. He said: “I was deeply gratified to see that Eva’s last book received from London the enthusiastic praise that we in New York had already given it.” He considered himself the discoverer of Eva Litchfield and dragged in New York from the kindness of his heart. Winnie was at once torn between her intense admiration of the show he made and her desire to shout at him “How dare you praise a beautiful woman?”

But there was present at the bar another discoverer of Eva Litchfield. Spencer Mapes rested his saturnine dark face on his extraordinarily long and thin hand and laughed at Addis. Molly wanted to know for what date the next discovery of genius in New York was scheduled: and yawned, and laughed at both of them. Leaning on the rail of the bar, she was so slender that her backward droop was almost a contortion.

A stranger slid along to stand beside her, holding on to the rail and facing her with a childlike eager appraisal. “My dear lady,” remarked this gentleman, “I never saw you before, and I haven’t the least idea who you are, but I feel sure you’re famous. I came down here because I was told that I’d see all the famous people. Damn it!” shouted the stranger, no longer able to restrain his disappointment, “I insist that you’re famous! And if you ain’t, then show me one of ’em? I came down here to look at celebrated persons. Show me the celebrated persons, will you, my good creature?” I judged that he had decided that none of us came up to his dream.

In the twitch of Molly’s sharp elbow there was a mental jog to my ribs. “Do—please—ask that question of the barkeep?” she modestly suggested to the strange gentleman. She had a trick of waiting, hanging on a man’s lips until he said something personal to her. Her long eyes languished, now, at the stranger. Triumph lit her face, and I saw that again she had misunderstood a man. She had a passion for translating all masculine glances into the caresses of love.

Winnie whispered to me: “Notice a change in her?”

“What’s it from?” I asked.

“Ah that’s what we don’t know,” said Winnie. “She’s trying her best to make us believe that she is involved in some affair. And of course her telling it makes it sound as if it were not true, and we know her so well that we are sure she’d tell it if it were true.”

“She looks wretchedly,” I said in the same low voice.

“You’ll find we all do,” said Winnie briefly.

I laughed. “Eva’s husband, I daresay you mean me to infer?”

“Wait till you see,” she told me ominously.

I asked her if Spencer Mapes were still Eva’s encroaching background. “Oh, encroaching!” she groaned.

As he came up to us, I endeavoured to hold my greeting to a friendly indifference. He looked as if he were concealing some deep anxiety, and said at once: “I am thankful you’ve at last returned, Dinah. I always feel that you can be counted on to stand by Eva.”

My recollections of Eva Litchfield, which before I had believed to be clear as daylight, had, through this confusion of innuendo, become a jumble of muggy half-tones. I thought: For God’s sake, Eva, why do you allow people to so use up your vital energy, blotting the flow of your inspiration as such interruptions must do some time if they haven’t done it already? From a long continued warm friendship, my attachment to her flared at this moment into idealization. I reproached myself that invariably I had been conscious of listening to her perplexities with avidity. I had said to her: “It comes down to this: one isn’t a novelist unless one has a consuming and all-embracing curiosity about people—all people—even those of whom one is fond—every human worm and every superhuman bore?” She had replied with her charming seriousness: “Of course.” And all the time I was conscious that she herself had no pure and cold-blooded curiosity about people whose problems did not touch her; when she listened to the recitals of those outside her life, she did it with warmth. Her good heart showed in her tolerance of the everlasting jabber of her friends—said I to myself, glancing forbiddingly at those whom Molly had invited to her little dinner in my honour. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I occasionally see when I am making a fool of myself. “Snap out of it, you hypocrite!” I began on myself. “You have every intention of hanging around Eva, of questioning, listening, and otherwise poking your nose—which Molly is right in dubbing a misfit—into things that are in no way your business, until you get at the bottom of this marriage. Don’t cavil at the right of others to do likewise.”

Doubtless my expression as I so took myself to task led Spencer Mapes on to say: “You must really go at once to see her. She has one of those little red brick houses in West Eleventh Street just off Fifth Avenue: did you know?”

I was surprised that she could afford a house. Her quality was too fine, too attenuated, to make of her a best seller. That the effulgently gifted Eva should live in a cramped apartment, under the almost sordid conditions with which the rest of us struggled, had always impressed us as an ironical twist of fate. Not that we consciously conceded these superior points to her; we did not, except in so far as we conceded the same to ourselves; but, looking back on the years that we had spent in New York—washed up on this beach from remote spots on the map of the country, brought together by our common interest in literature and held together by our fear of taking our eyes off each other’s development—our wish to succeed in juxtaposition with our desire for the other fellow to fail, or at the most to keep his distance a few paces in the rear—we all, I think, brought up points against Eva out of our conviction of her possession of every gift in the power of a fairy godmother to bestow. At least, so it seemed to me, this evening, standing looking intently and deceitfully into Spencer Mapes’ equally dissembling fixed stare. We had had a way of saying, or suggesting: “Oh, yes, she’s perfectly beautiful, and she writes like a seraph, but for God’s sake why does she do those things?” And Eva said of herself that she had not, at any rate, an immoral impulse; why then, she asked tragically, did people go out of their way to talk about her? Her offense lay in being too pretty to allow other women to forgive her her talents.

In the light of Spencer Mapes’ surface glassiness, I saw that the truth was that Eva needed a protection which so far life had not granted her. Children and animals saw this. Although she was only intermittently fond of children, and then almost theoretically, they invariably assumed towards her the indulgent fondness of very old and wise persons; they might have been watching through the play hour that this innocent should not harm herself. Her Negro maid hovered over her, quite simply assuming, so far as she could, the part of mother.

I scowled at Spencer Mapes. “Why don’t you keep away from her? She’s incapable of seeing through you.”

He was light in his reply. “And what do you see—you with your singleness of purpose?”

Afterwards, I regretted having replied; for I gave her away as I saw her. Also, his smile, which he preserved in its initial spontaneity, made me doubt my motive: was I pleading for Eva or solely striving to inflict a scratch on this immovable, taunting man? I told him that he played upon her weaknesses. I reminded him that, although she did the ugliest things, she was driven by a strong sense of harmony. Ridden by some nervous instinct that she had no great amount of time, she wasted much time in bewailing the world’s misunderstanding of her life: was it good for her that he should so deliberately add to this game of cross purposes? Having blurted out these lucidities, and thinking along lines thus engendered, I stood looking at him in that abstraction which throws a dulling veil over the sight but with the feeling in my flesh that a cat gives me. I wondered how he sprung. He would never do a thing so physically definite as to spring, I told myself. I was certain that he had not taken the constructive step of endeavouring to marry Eva, because, possibly, he had not been able to make up his mind that he could not do without her. His eyes gleamed at me with enjoyment of my suspicions. Doubtless he still devoted all his spare time to hanging around her. I should find him, as we had always found him, at the parties where he knew he would meet her, sitting in sight of her and directing his remarks at, or to, her. In this fashion he played the cat with the worried mouse, letting her out with praise, dragging her back with judiciously placed destructive criticism. He was always faintly derogatory.

Faint derogation was in his tone when he asked if I had ever met the man who was now Eva’s husband; his emphasis docketed the marriage with passing experiments. “She insists she did it for love of him,” he said with quiet amusement; his amusement was never hearty. James Pomeroy, who could say coarse things with impunity, once remarked that belly laughter had never escaped Mapes’ chiselled lips. “But, as you know and will never admit, there’s a good deal of the snob in our Eva. She thoroughly believes, poor girl, that what she wants of life is the social security which every now and then she so deliberately chucks overboard.”

I said that I had not come back to play blind man’s buff. “I intend to see her tomorrow; and I’ll find out for myself these equivocal secrets at which all of you hint. If there’s anything I detest—” I almost gnashed my teeth at him—“it’s to be played!”

His soft laughter, his “My dear Dinah!” brought me to the point whither he had wished to lead me: I asked him what he was trying to do about Eva’s marriage.

He looked, conventionally, shocked. “My dear Dinah!” he once more breathed. He was compassionate of my imbecility when he said that for no consideration would he throw a stumbling block in Eva’s path to the eventual stabilization of her life; but with every word he spoke I became more suspicious. “Try to be fair, old girl,” I admonished myself. “Try to come to conclusions as a man would, personal likes and dislikes aside.” Glancing along the bar, I amended this to: “Be as fair as men tell us they are.”

I said finally that it was his choice of words. “You know, and I know, that very deliberately you’ve confused the state of affairs, so that when I see Eva tomorrow—and I’ve every intention of seeing her as soon as I decently can, and shall tell her everything you’ve said——”

He asked pleasantly: “What have I said?”

This pushed me into the fury of a baffled woman. There was nothing left except to cry that I did not believe a word of it, a blunder which he promptly capped by remarking that he had said nothing for me to believe or disbelieve. “You won’t be helping Eva by fighting her other friends,” he concluded.

“Friends?” I came back at him. “Friends, Iago?”

He looked, if anything, pleasanter than ever. “Our own dear Dinah!” he murmured.

I listened, with determination, to the hubbub of the bar. The strange gentleman’s voice rose at measured intervals, as if he chanted. Winnie Conant screamed at Molly Underhill: “My good woman, you may be my hostess, but keep your hands off Mr. W. I won’t stand for personal liberties. Liberties with my spirit will go down all right; but just you lay off Mr. W.” Addis Wickersham cleared his throat; and even this prosaic act was in the grand manner.

Molly shouted: “Don’t be a wattled turkey gobbler. I’m your hostess, as you so graphically put it; and we’re going upstairs this minute and dine; and try to be a good Arab and eat my salt without spitting in my eye.”

Noise went up the stairs with us, entering into the dining-room and colliding with noise already established there. I had been out of it for so long that it occurred to me to wonder why we should assert that we gathered together because of our interest in each other’s talk, as seldom did we listen to what was being said. It came to our ears in a concatenation robbed of all meaning; only when a chance remark struck against a particular interest did one of us hear with the intelligence. Molly’s latest pet sat beside her, gulping down whatever she chose to say; he, of us all, was fresh enough to mourn over a lost word. “I work,” expounded Molly, “under the driving power of the most fundamental of all instincts. I mean—that instinct which draws men and women together. I mean,” she went into it more fully but still languidly, “I can’t—I simply can’t—work except under the influence of blasted love. When the affair is going on I give myself up to the sweep of the wings of the angels. Then, during the inevitable resulting blight, I work.” She drooped over the very young man. “It had occurred to me, on the spur of the moment, that the souse at the bar downstairs might treat me to a good blight.”

“Tell us more,” Winnie urged. “How did you lose him?”

Molly seemed already to have the blight upon her. “As usual with his sex, he wanted to see Eva Litchfield. Said he had gloated over her picture. That latest photograph doesn’t look like her in the least.”

I pinned her down. “She’s changed, then?”

Molly shrugged. “Wouldn’t she be showing wear?” she drawled. When in this mood she said something spiteful, one felt that the pauses between her words were insufferable. Her manner was a blend of the prostitute and the acidulated spinster. I thought of Eva, whose manner charmed me; hers was a tenuous aloofness that under a strain might give way but never descend. Hers was the cool pride of a head held high and eyes that looked straight. Her brows levelled, she threw at the world, by the power of this direct regard, that a vast disgust of all physical contact held her imagination.

The very young man begged Molly: “Go on talking? Don’t stop?”

PART TWO

I

I did not doubt that my invitation to tea at the Misses Ingoldsby’s was the direct outcome of Gertrude Cuyler’s dissatisfaction over the abrupt termination of our chat. I knew her aunts but slightly. They were middle-aged ladies of bridge-playing proclivities, and except for the interpenetration of Eva Litchfield we should have continued upon a basis of mutual indifferent kindliness.

I picked a careful way through the jungle of their useless possessions. The apartment was cluttered with “things,” the heterogeneous collection of the Victorian travelling female. They proved their culture by visible evidence of the number of countries in which they had shopped, and, the spoils requiring perches, there were too many cabinets against the walls and too many tables crowding the floor. Everything was handsome, and the effect was as a blow on the head. I accepted a cup of tea, a beverage for which I harbour a vicious dislike, and found that at once my mind was tinged with jaundiced opposition to whatever they intended saying. That they had prepared a line of discussion I saw plainly.

I was not to be left in doubt. The elder Miss Ingoldsby at once said: “My dear Mrs. Avery, what do you think of Nicholas Van Suydam having married Eva Litchfield? Do you believe that they have even a slim chance at happiness?”

Between the Misses Ingoldsby lay a matter or five or six years of added experience for Miss Augusta. As was only proper, therefore, Miss Augusta had long ago assumed entire charge of Miss Lois’ mind and body. The sisters were so unlike that their friends never ceased admiring the further differentiation of them by the precisely right baptismal names. Miss Augusta had a firm and upright character; suitably, her figure was large and firmly handsome. Her splendidly preserved face bore more than a trace of that coldly regular, pink-and-white beauty brought into fashion by Lillian Russell. Her silver hair, of which she retained an abundance, her good skin, her profile, her impressive voice and the weight of her emphasis on her own remarks, served to make Miss Augusta an asset at dinner-parties, although the truth was that she could, and did, out-talk the hardiest. During the period of the early Nineties, she had had a romance which had served to add to her stature as a model woman: she had fallen in love with a married man, and had then taken herself in hand. Her heart, however, proving the only thing beyond her control and remaining true to this implanted image, her abounding energy had had to seek an outlet which should not be disloyal to the image. By way of securing this outlet, she developed into the complete letter-writer of her generation; and this accomplishment, once so obligatory with her class, had never been permitted to run to seed. When the rush of the times had left her with no correspondents because she wrote too often for modern persons to find the time to reply, she took to writing, on world causes, to all individuals who had done things either good or bad; the merit or discredit of their performances made no difference, as in any case what she wanted was to air her own views.

Miss Augusta was given to saying: “Sister Lois is so light-minded.” For the younger Miss Ingoldsby was short and plump, dimpled and inclined to laugh on any provocation. It was easy to see that Miss Augusta, as usual, was right. Miss Lois was so far from serious that upon those occasions when Miss Augusta reproved her for levity she took this as a pretext for still more giggling. Miss Lois cared not at all for causes. She cared not a snap of her fingers for anything which might force her to be low in her mind, as she called an ascent into higher realms of thought. Quite properly, Miss Augusta’s jutting chin put into disrepute Miss Lois’ modest sliding contour.

“My dear Mrs. Avery,” advanced Miss Augusta after a pause during which she marshalled her reasons for having brought about this conference, “we felt that it might be advisable to discuss what can be done about poor Nicholas and—poor—Eva. You young people are so apt to be heedless until the mischief is wrought.”

I endeavoured not to grimace over the tea. It was sweetened, and made more detestable by the addition of cream. “But surely you can’t be so gracious as to call us ‘young people’?”

“Young to me,” said Miss Augusta airily. “Young to me.”

It was in this spirit of throwing a rosy and dissembling glow over the gathering, I make no doubt, that she had invited the one man. Mr. Tappan Tillinghast strolled in to give us the support and the stabilizing weight of his presence. He was strikingly elegant, as always, and, as always, he had in evidence his one defect, to which his friends were accustomed but which instantly drew the eye of a stranger. With all Mr. Tappan Tillinghast’s refined taste in dress, with all his care of his person, his collars invariably appeared to be too large for his neck. This was because one looked for a prominent Adam’s apple and failed to find it. From Mr. Tappan Tillinghast’s head to his feet there could be discovered no protuberance. His legs were long and straight and thin, his waist, even at his age, was thin. He was the envy of younger men because it gave him no trouble to remain without curves. One might have fancied that he had at one time in his life been subjected to a lengthy drying-out process in the tropics, although he had never been known to venture into warm climates. Everything about him was contradictory: he looked as if he had no blood in his veins, and he had never been known to suffer from the cold; he spoke with the chilliest of intonations, and inside he glowed with romance; he gave the impression of having had his springs of being dammed at the source, and for all of his conscious existence he had adored the elder Miss Ingoldsby. One had to acknowledge that his pale blue eyes looked as if they had been washed too often, but a quizzical expression lurked behind their parchment lids. His grey hair was never rampant; one could easily believe that it had grown from his infant head in the same orderly arrangement of thin strands clinging decorously to his skull that now so nicely topped his formally correct turn-out. His mouth, exposed by a carefully trimmed moustache, was shown to be large though thin-lipped; but this niggardly cut of his lips gave no indication of a meanness of temperament but rather hinted at so profound an understanding of himself that, for the sake of an inherited taste in the affairs of life, Mr. Tillinghast had early set about getting the better of errant fancies.

In his presence certain topics were avoided. No one asked for his address. It took all of his scant means to keep himself going at the Knickerbocker Club. It would never have occurred to him to give up a club that he might be said to have inherited in order to be more comfortable in the small matter of where to live. None knew how, and few knew where, he lived. Actually, as I had discovered by accident, he resided in the East Thirties, in one of the flats evolved from the shell of his forefathers’ fine old house.

Bending at his admirable waist, he imprinted a kiss on my hand; and this kiss was sadly pleasant in its aroma of a bygone day.

Miss Augusta’s voice rolled over us, massing us into an audience; Miss Lois spattered a gaiety that was powerless to stem the flow of such inevitability as that of her sister’s militant uplift; Mr. Tillinghast maintained his seat, however precariously, in the saddle of his balanced friendship. Between tea drinking and the anesthesia of Miss Augusta’s phrases I felt myself to be neatly suspended. “Brains directed to a worthy end—personalities turned into the service of our country——” Miss Augusta’s gobblets of profundity was lavished on us. “Do you realize that in every case of a President of the United States being assassinated, it was inspired by the Pope?”

Miss Lois giggled. “My goodness, Gussie, are you going to tack that on to the poor old gentleman?”

“I refer,” said Miss Augusta, “to the Pope at Rome.”

“I didn’t know there was another one,” gurgled Miss Lois with great enjoyment.

“Ho! Ho!” came suddenly from Mr. Tillinghast, who then looked ashamed of himself.

Miss Augusta could not be said to recover herself, for she had not for a moment lost herself. “Shall we get down to the business that brought us together today?” she enquired.

Surreptitiously wiping his eyes, Mr. Tillinghast smiled attenuatedly: one would have thought that never had he laughed aloud, because never had anything amused him. “Business? With three fair ladies?”

I said: “It seems we’ve got to get it over with.”

“Quite right,” approved Miss Augusta, waving her handsome white hand. “We will now come to the point.”

Miss Lois said surprisingly: “Gussie, you always do talk too much.”

Accentuating her parliamentary pose, Miss Augusta endeavoured to stare down her younger sister. “I should think, Sister Lois, that what concerns so intimate a friend as Lavinia Van Suydam concerns us in only a slightly less degree.”

“I can’t forget,” continued Miss Lois, “having heard Eva say to Nicholas that she needed to feel at home. She sounded forlorn: so there! And I don’t yet see, Mrs. Avery, why Eva shouldn’t feel at home with her husband’s family and their friends.” She wound up with her giggle, which I began to suspect of ramifications.

Miss Augusta emitted what in anyone else would have been called a true snort. “She followed that up, if I remember rightly, by saying that she wanted no more condescension. Such ingratitude! After all that Lavinia, and Lavinia’s friends, have tried to do for her!” But I thought that she looked really hurt.

The younger Miss Ingoldsby went along her own pleasantly winding way. “Nicholas has learned to curse!” She defied her sister’s outraged parliamentary hand. “Oh, yes, he has, Gussie! The time we ran across them at the speakeasy Tilly took us to——”

“Ahem!” hastily interposed Mr. Tillinghast. “I do really suspect that all along Nicholas knew how to curse.” But his eye, taking a furtive survey of the ground with Miss Augusta, showed me that the institution of the speakeasy was one of the lady’s inspirations for battle.

“Well, anyway,” continued Miss Lois, “Eva sailed in like a bird. She has a pretty chin; it’s always so high in air. Nicholas was too upset to notice that they were passing our table. And——”

Miss Augusta’s frigidity was directed at Mr. Tillinghast who had escorted her to unsuitability. “He didn’t expect to see us in such a place. I refer to what is called a speakeasy.”

“He was growling in his throat,” joyfully continued Miss Lois. “And Eva’s skirt went rather billowing down the room. Oh, dear! I’d so like to be young and slim and have my skirts billow! People just have to look at Eva.”

“Outside of her appearance, people would stare at Eva,” I said mildly. “Do please remember that she’s tremendously well known. Her name is known, but also her face.”

“Oh, of course!” screamed Miss Lois. “That’s what Nicholas didn’t like. I heard him distinctly, roaring—although it was under his breath, it sounded for all the world like a roar—‘Damn her public!’”

“Sister Lois!” interrupted Miss Augusta. “Enough! I will not permit such language.”

“He was roaring to his own public, which is his intelligence, I daresay,” I suggested amiably.

They looked enquiringly at me. “What?” they said.

In a nearby apartment someone played badly on the piano. The notes fell indifferently, like drops of water. Life seemed a merry-go-round, getting us nowhere. I sipped tea and looked them over with cool appraisal. I decided that it was a case of dog eat dog: they would eat Eva, if Eva did not eat them first. The game is the same; people may be different, in different cases, but the game remains the same. And the old saws are long-lived because they are true. The piano tinkled, tinkled, tinkled. The tea was awful. I wondered if in decency I could leave and so stop off their discussion.

Spencer Mapes must perch like a raven on Nicholas Van Suydam’s shoulder—always on hand at the wrong time—making a peck at his thoughts and hitting the mark; for Miss Lois went on: “That Mr. Mapes—such a friend of Eva’s, isn’t he, Mrs. Avery?—tried to smooth Nicholas down. I heard him say ‘You’re so lucky that you don’t have to advertise your work; aren’t you? You find it difficult to see why we pander to the buyers of our goods?’ So tactful of him, to try to smooth dear Nicholas down. Nicholas has his father’s fiery temper.”

Miss Augusta put her teacup down with a clatter. “Sister Lois, if you would make an effort to be less frivolous we might get at what I wished to see Mrs. Avery about.”

For a minute, Miss Lois was silent. But Miss Augusta took too long to set the stage, and she started in again. “Do you know, Tilly, I do feel that all the friction started at Lavinia’s dinner? I know that’s what Gussie is getting ready to talk about. But Gussie won’t believe that——”

“And how, pray,” begged Miss Augusta as if any answer would be incorrect, “did we hurt her feelings? I hold that she displayed a lamentable lack of the proper feeling. You ask what happened, Mrs. Avery? I’ll tell you. I aroused fury on her part by asking her to recite some of her work.”

The younger Miss Ingoldsby repeated her idea.

The elder Miss Ingoldsby dismissed the objection with a wave of her hand. “She was merely awaiting an excuse to drag Nicholas out of the home of his ancestors.”

“If you had asked her in another way?” ventured Mr. Tillinghast. His long loyalty did not fail Miss Augusta. Once upon a time, she might have loved a married man, but he had every confidence in her. His suggestion was without the strength of conviction.

Miss Augusta appealed to me in a deadly calm. “Mrs. Avery, do you see why Eva should have been affronted? I’ve always understood that authors like nothing better than to read their writings to their friends.”

I was immediately under the necessity of saying with emphasis: “To their friends, yes. Mightn’t it have been that Eva felt you weren’t friends?”

This released all forces hitherto pent in convention. “I must tell you, Mrs. Avery,” said Miss Augusta with spirit, “that Nicholas’ wife will bring his mother’s grey hair in sorrow to the grave.” I luxuriated in this hackneyed condemnation. She looked sharply at me. “That amuses you? But tell me this: could you yourself live amicably in the house with Eva Van Suydam?”

It was not compulsory to tell her the truth, that none of us could live together. Quiet at home was necessary; and with more than one seeking quiet, noise, strangely enough, reigned.

“When she left Lavinia’s dinner-party,” resumed Miss Augusta, “she was in a tantrum. She said ‘I’m a working woman, and must get home to my labours’. Poor Nicholas! His face was a study.”

I helped myself to another buttered muffin. The Misses Ingoldsby were heavy providers.

“She was so artificial about it. Poor Nicholas said—trying to put a good face on it—that the making of books was a sealed book to him; and she was kittenish and shook her finger at him. ‘A pun! For shame!’ It sounded most silly.”

“You got yourself in trouble,” interrupted Miss Lois with a rare censoriousness, “by trying to manage things. You always try to manage people, and they don’t like it. You started in directly we had left the table, and drew up chairs and told Eva to stand on a certain spot; it was exactly as if she had been hired to amuse the guests. I’ve been sure, ever since, that it made trouble.”

Miss Augusta reared back in her straight chair and looked at her younger sister. In her silent look there was more power than in her spoken word. The air became impregnated with her conviction that Eva had shown base ingratitude. When finally she spoke it was to remark that there were many who were grateful for what she had done for them. Thinking of how, since my return, I had been kept to the question of Eva’s marriage, my own remarks became tinged with acrimony. She almost hastened with her reply. “My dear Mrs. Avery, you don’t think that I should take up your time—not to mention my own, which I assure you is filled with useful tasks—with this trivial scene at Lavinia Van Suydam’s? No, indeed! I really planned to request you to use your influence about the apportioning of the rooms in Nicholas’ house.” I must have stared with, almost, my mouth open. But her eyes were beaming with the best intentions.

I made the reasonable request to know what she could possibly mean. She explained that she was afraid Nicholas would come to his death by the present distribution of sunlight in his home. “It was done by Eva,” she told me significantly. Another woman would have been disconcerted by my amused bewilderment; but the elder Miss Ingoldsby took it as a tribute to her ability as a public speaker. She sat waiting for me to heckle her. She knew how to wait for what she desired: it was I, and not she, who broke down. I said that I was sorry I did not understand.

“Of course you remember how the small houses on the side streets are arranged?” she began her exposition of Eva’s iniquity. “On each floor there is one sunny room and one in which the sun never shines. It is unhealthy to get no sunshine,” she said through tightly pressed lips. She made me know that never willingly would she condemn.

“And Eva has the sunny rooms?” I knew that she must: she loved the sun.

“She has, Mrs. Avery.”

I laughed, seeing Eva at her writing-table in transparent shafts of golden sunshine. I knew how she arranged her background; always, her study was the same. A glow of copper—the light streaming through chintz figured with bright birds and roses which were rust-coloured and big as cabbages, and falling on bowls of overblown tea roses revealing their copper hearts. Against the roses with their deep hearts and their imminent surcease, Eva’s head was that of a painted saint wearing a halo of beaten gold leaf. I said in her defense: “She hadn’t time to stop and think what was good for him.” But disapproval so permeated the drawing-room that I hastened to add a lame second thought: “Eva is a very hard worker, and sometimes she seems much more heedless than in her heart she is.”

I was not sure whether Miss Augusta’s resultant sniff was one of approval of my defense of my friend or disapproval of my evident inability to see her grounds for a virtuous indignation. She said shortly: “Poor Nicholas will shoot up weedy and pale like a potato sprouting in a cellar.”

Miss Lois’ giggle relieved a suspense that I felt to be fairly exuding from Mr. Tappan Tillinghast. “I don’t think he would like to be called a potato in a cellar, Gussie; he’s such a good looking man. Besides, when they were showing us the house he really did impress me as being awfully proud of it. And I did hear her say to you that it was lucky that when she wrote she wanted sunshine, and when he worked at home he needed a north light for his drawing-table.”

“She didn’t explain a like apportioning of the bedrooms,” brooded Miss Augusta.

Mr. Tillinghast ventured that he fancied Nicholas admired his wife so much that he was contented. “Remember when he said ‘Suppose we go back to Eva’s study? She looks so sweet at her writing-table—like a little girl playing’?”

Miss Lois gurgled: “Eva does know how to manage men! And I do think——” Her pause was caused by her stifling giggle.

“Well?” demanded Miss Augusta. “What were you going to say, Sister Lois?”

Miss Lois almost swooned, so spasmodic was her giggling fit. “I meant, Eva does know how to pull the wool over gentlemen’s eyes!”

Properly, Miss Augusta passed this over in silence. When she inflated her lungs it was for a further exposition of her own argument. “She leaves Nicholas in those dreadful northern rooms during the warm weather when the only breath of air comes through the southern windows. It’s useless for him to assert—he is so chivalrous, being Lavinia’s son—that he prefers the north light for his work. He works at his office. And if the house is so good to work in, why—will you tell me—does she take herself off to some cool spot every summer?”

I refused to commit myself beyond the remark that I saw nothing I could do about it. This brought from Miss Augusta the innuendo that I did not yet know the half of it. There were, for instance, unnecessary and solitary trips to Europe——

I enquired: “Do you think they have a chance on earth?”

They turned to face me fully. “But we thought you were against us in the matter!”

My calm was now uncivil. “With every acquaintance taking a hand, they are, of course, heading for the rocks.”

“Dear me! Dear me!” grieved Mr. Tillinghast. “I should really dislike to think it. They’re so well matched in the way of looks. I admire Eva’s looks more than I can tell you.” He failed to observe that Miss Augusta now strung his well meant words on a handy rosary to be used during his inevitable penance. He swept into what was almost lyricism. “She has such a broad and gracious brow, and her eyebrows take a flying line. Her hair seems to fly upwards, too, although it really never blows about. Did you ever notice that about her, Augusta—that she is never frowsy? There’s something about her,” he said in his nice elderly voice, “that is wing-like, aspiring. She’s—she’s aloof, untouchable, and reaching up. She seems to be looking at a facet of the star to which she’s hitched her wagon; and the star is eternally within and beyond her reach, poor girl!”

“Well!” The monosyllable might have been propelled from Miss Augusta by her inner and boiling emotions.

Mr. Tillinghast gave her every indication of having jumped the fence. Gazing into space made lovely by his faint regret, he said: “Her mouth—such a small mouth!—is fastidious.”

Miss Augusta said: “But not generous.”

Mr. Tillinghast asked her: “Have you ever noticed that she has the nicest little straight nose?”

“It will be pinched when she is older,” remarked Miss Augusta.

I hurried to the window embrasure and stood looking down into the uninteresting street; I hoped they would take my shaking form for the sign of some tender emotion. That they did was proven by their guilty haste in urging me back to the tea table. “Poor Tilly isn’t what he was,” Miss Augusta reassured me in a whisper, as she plied me with a fresh buttered muffin. “Do eat this, Mrs. Avery. You’re such a scrap of a person, I always think you must be dieting.”

“If you mean, that he’s in love with her,” I suggested maliciously, “he is eating too many muffins for that state of mind.”

For Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had absent-mindedly reached out a heavily veined hand and appropriated the muffin intended for me. His eyes retained his visions; he dreamily munched the muffin. Sure of Miss Augusta’s sympathetic understanding because he had always been able to count on it, he thought aloud. “It must have been such a strange contrast, that between Lavinia and Eva, the day they met. Both such pale women.”

“Indeed!” sniffed Miss Augusta. “And how, pray, did you come to know about it?”

“A little bird told me,” said he with another of this group’s platitudes. He put a roguish head on one side.

“Meaning Gertrude? She had little to do, not to tell her own aunt!”

“No,” he said. “Oh, no indeed: Lavinia told me.”

Then, she judged, he had at last got the straight of it. How straight the tale must have been, coming from Mrs. Van Suydam—how she must have hit out from the shoulder, defeated as she was by Eva who took no part in it—how bitterly, in short, she must have told her story to this old friend, was a thing that he would never tell me except fragmentarily.

“Lavinia went up there to fetch Nicholas home,” he went into it. He implied that she had thus flung down her gauntlet to fate. Her head scarcely reached her son’s shoulder; but she had dominated him always, and she would dominate him now. She had felt from the start that something dreadful was to happen. There was an underlying meaning to this. It was her duty to find the meaning, if her son were close to it, and she felt in her bones that he was. She felt that it might be the meaning of life itself. One could not manage life, which had a way of sneaking up behind and clubbing one through the medium of the child. She had reported to Mr. Tillinghast that she had said to her son: “Please don’t keep me waiting.” And instantly she knew that she had lost. Stiff and straight, she faced him in silence. She waved off his offer to escort her to her carriage.

“Nicholas was very quiet, too, she told me,” continued Mr. Tillinghast. “She looked back from the head of the stairs. She knew that already she was forgotten. She said that at this moment she tasted bitterness.” It was from force of habit only that her lips said “Humph! Indeed!”

I drank tea that was strong from the bottom of the pot. When I thought it safe to glance at Mr. Tillinghast, I said to him: “Thank you for telling me.”

“What can you mean, dear Mrs. Avery?” demanded Miss Augusta curiously.

“Oh—” I said flippantly, giving it to them for what it was worth—“there are always two sides, aren’t there?”

II

The sun shone, sparrows twittered love, and false spring tricked me into a rebirth of my first delight in New York. If I sat long enough on the bench in Washington Square I would catch the early crocuses springing up. But it was December, and nothing pleasant could last. There was dirty weather lying dead ahead.

Because the day was so fine, I had walked downtown. I was going to call on Eva, who lived four blocks away; but it was early, and she might still be at work. And to sit in the sun and gaze at the pleasant pinkish bricks in the row of old Georgian houses on the northern side of the Square was delightful. I was pleased when Mrs. Van Suydam’s maroon brougham came in sight around the corner from Macdougal Street; its colour toned in with the pinkish bricks and with the pale blue sky. Every fine afternoon, at the correct hour for a lady’s airing, Higginson donned his puce livery, mounted the box-seat of the brougham, and drove the bays which had once been spanking from the stable which still fulfilled its original mission on Macdougal Alley. His little eyes looked neither to the right nor to the left; for he ignored the life of the Alley which had once been a mews and was now an artists’ colony. With the laudable end in view of showing the inhabitants that he flouted them, he contrived to get around the sharp turn into Macdougal Street, and around the further curve into Washington Square, with much stamping of hoofs. For Higginson was conservative. He was the worst of snobs: he was a horseman. And he could remember when the smells along Macdougal Alley had been those of horses and harness and not, as now, the stench of gasoline and the emanations of artistic life. He drew up, with a flourish, before the high front steps of the Van Suydam mansion, froze into immobility, and prepared to endure with scorn the jibes of roller-skating and ball-playing roisterers in the Square. I was sure that he shared the opinion of his mistress on the decline of manners and customs.

I watched Mrs. Van Suydam come down the steps and give directions over her shoulder to the maid who saw to it that no errant gust of wind should lift from their decent protection of elderly limbs the last petticoats in the city. Although a small woman, she gave the impression of solidity, of standing in the last ditch without acknowledging it to be the last, of fighting for a lost cause and believing it to be the only cause. Her ability lay in an inability to see that her people, inheriting New Amsterdam, had not kept up with New York. She had confidence in herself because if she had ever been crossed she knew how to wait until matters adjusted themselves. All of this showed on her face, which was never serene but which was always composed. She had bent her will to a temporary acceptance of the repugnant. For a moment, she stood looming out at the Square with unseeing eyes.

The carriage door slammed. The message of the slam of the door of a horse-drawn carriage differs from that of a motorcar. She was off for the drive which she had made an institution.

I sat, then, on my sunny bench, ruminating over Winnie Conant’s contribution to the various tales of Eva and her husband. I could not bring myself to look upon that scene as significant of future trouble. Nicholas Van Suydam, with his long legs and his pipe, apostrophizing himself and remaining unruffled in the midst of the turmoil of the Wickersham library, verged on the charming. “My man, if ever there was a time—” I shut my eyes and strove to recall his appearance: he had, I remembered, the pleasantest of faces.

I had called Eva, in the morning, and had heard over the telephone her high, sweet voice. Promptly she had rushed into “You should be the last one to reproach me with neglect. You should know how it is when one is torn asunder over a book. You should know that it’s actually birth-pains, in the suffering it causes one. The period of gestation is the same, too—a matter of the best part of a year.” And she began laughing at her conception of the situation. “Do you know, Dinah, you’ve brought me luck, already! Already I’ve said something very, very good.” She did not stop to make a note of it; she never forgot a word she said. She added, on a hasty after-thought: “Do you have to see me today? I mean, is it of particular importance?”

I was firm about it being important. “After all,” I told her, “I’ve heard the other side of it.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” she rejoined, “that I’m in the funniest quandary.”

“Funny? It didn’t impress me as being in the least amusing.”

“Don’t be literal,” she said; and made the appointment.

In Eleventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, there still stands a row of red brick houses which is a miniature Washington Square with smiles thrown in. For these intimate little houses smile from their small-paned windows, and run down their tidy front steps and through their little areas and hail their friends. The city might be across one of the rivers; but it is around the corner, and leans over with a leer to remind the small houses that it is only a question of time when they will go into the hands of the wreckers. If the passerby listens, he will hear the rat-tat-tat of riveters. If he lifts his eyes from the always gay window-boxes, he can see, rising against the sky, the hideous steel ribs of unborn towers. Artists passing along the sidewalk thank providence for the small houses; architects possibly reflect that they do things on a bigger scale, these days.

I walked past a modern apartment house, and past one or two remodelled houses, to the little houses in their pristine style. I wondered if Nicholas Van Suydam knew that it was in him to build the greatest of the towers now thrusting their insolent heads skyward; and I reflected that the towers might be in his imagination, but the old red brick of New York had always been in his blood. Not for a moment did I doubt which of the two had selected this house. Home means the opposite of a man’s work, while a woman carries her home with her, even, when necessary, into the office. I went up the high and narrow stoop, liking the house more and more as I noticed that even the basement windows were charmingly curtained and as I pulled the shiny brass knob of the old-fashioned bell. I smiled at the house, and the house, I felt, smiled back at me, personally good-natured about it. Home means a house that smiles inside and out. Through the curtains of the drawing-room windows I saw a chintz easy-chair, a smoking stand beside it and flowers beyond it. To the elderly eyes of Mrs. Van Suydam, accustomed as they were to what was undoubtedly the austerity of the Washington Square mansion, this aspect of a cheery sudden blooming must have seemed ominous of early departure.

A warm welcome awaited me behind the white painted door. Eva’s personal maid, Mattie, smiled broadly. But she had time to whisper: “Miss Dinah, please ma’am lemme speak to you jes’ a minute ’fore you goes?”

I started up the flight of stairs to the second storey. “The door towards the back, Miss Dinah,” Mattie called after me, intelligently staying at the foot of the stairway’s drag on the heart.

Eva had a way of enveloping a guest in a greeting the warmth of which became at once a recitation of her own affairs. “Oh, darling—oh, I’m so glad to see you! If you only knew how I need to talk with you!”

“H-m-m,” I remarked, if this exhalation of the breath can be called a remark. “Over the telephone, you didn’t impress me as feeling so strongly about seeing me.”

She paid no attention to this. “Oh—” she cried on a rising note—“if you only knew! Everything is going to pot!” Holding me by the hand, she dragged me into her study, dashing past the chairs, pushing me on the day-bed and throwing herself down beside me to fix her eyes on my face. “Everything is wrong,” she wailed. She had a long and slender and round throat, and the hollows at the base were delicately modelled. But her face had begun to suggest wasted years; it was the face of one to whom already life had brought disillusion. I thought her more nervously upset than I had ever before seen her.

The room was familiar although in a house that was new to me. It might have been the study in any of Eva’s residences. Over the whole place, seeming to be part of the house itself although it was really Eva’s dressing up of her personality, there hung the scent of tea roses. I told her how delightful I had found the window-boxes, and she gave me an odd look and said that it had been about the window-boxes that she and Nicholas had had one of their first disagreements. “I had forgotten all about the house because I was on a book. And it came out that the geraniums had collapsed in that awful pulpy mess which is one of the horrors of autumn. And he said to me that it was strange I’d talk so much about beauty and not hate the way the geraniums looked. I daresay the sensible course under attack would be to imitate the wild things in the woods: sit motionless until the attacker’s attention has been diverted. But I reply; I always reply. He can be rather hateful, like all equable men.”

“Aren’t you happy with him?” I asked at once.

She blared her eyes. “Happy—with Nick? Of course I am. That is—I could be, if people let us alone.”

“You mean you see too many people? No time to be quietly happy and contented?”

“Sentimental as ever!” she teased. “I mean, in plain words, that everyone—Nick’s friends who aren’t mine, and my friends who aren’t his—take a hand in the least thing we do. Of course both sides have been at you about us?” From my smile she knew that this guess was correct, and went on with what she would have called her own side. “Let me tell you that they aren’t the amiable meddlers who beset all newly wed couples. These meddlers are almost malignant—at least, his side of the mob are malignant. But both sides give an impression of concerted action. They give the impression—his side, I mean, of course—of bitterly resenting any appearance on our part of getting on together. They are the prophets howling in the wilderness that they ‘told us so.’ And, if it doesn’t come out the way they prophesied, they will make it.”

I asked what she meant by this. It appeared that she meant only her momentary irritation at all people; and this seemed to me to be the passing phase of the last long stretch with the book. I felt relieved, and amused, and vastily aggravated. Today, she was pettish over something that ordinarily she would enjoy. I advanced the contingency that her husband might have had to face the problem of readjusting his life and work to her presence, and at once her face became grave. “That is one of the difficulties. He’s lost, I fear, the abstraction of his ideas.”

My mood changed, and I laughed heartily. “How can anyone hold an abstract idea while you are around?”

She was indignant. “I should inspire them.”

“My dear,” I told her, “you have a way of shattering people. You have a trick of making everyone feel inferior to you.”

Because she knew this to be true, she paid no attention. She said that he would come into the house quietly, tiptoeing upstairs to his dusty workroom; he must get to his drawing-table and sketch the vision that shone, bright as day, in his head. Even the shining sight of Eva might injure the delicate fabric of the as yet disembodied image. He would feel sure, she said, that when the dark pressed on his windowpanes he would see it as he had seen it in the first flush of his enthusiasm. “I fixed up a workroom for him,” she explained. “And I let him keep it as grimy with charcoal dust as he wishes. He’s comfortably slouchy, and agreeably smutty, and this should please him, I’m sure. I don’t think men care how they look when they work: as I do, and as I’m sure you do.” She gave this a moment’s thought, and continued: “But he breaks in on me when I’m working.”

“Do you break in on him when he’s working?”

She began to laugh at what she described as herself smudged with charcoal from the injudicious embraces of her husband. “We’ve had some queer love-making in that horribly ugly room.” She recalled one day in particular when from his ravings, as she described it, she had pieced together the tale of his experience; and, telling it to me, she fitted these fragments into a story. How much of this was Nicholas, and how much Eva, she herself could not have made out when she had finished; but I suspected that in the end she would believe that it was all hers.

He had run down the steps of the Elevated station and emerged, with the permanence of the solid flat ground again under his feet, on the twisted line of Sixth Avenue. Although he had got off the train high in the air at Eighth Street, he now found himself at Tenth, in front of the Jefferson Market Police Court; for this is one of the spots whereon Greenwich Village thumbs a derisive nose at the regularity of geometric New York. He gave it no heed; he was used to it. He hurried because he wished to reach home in as short a time as possible, and not because Sixth Avenue smelled of butchers and grocers, of cobblers, and of frying chops in all-night restaurants. His head was ecstatically full of the thing that had occurred to him on the ride downtown from his office. Staring in at, without seeing, the flying intimacies of second storey life in squalid tenements along the way, he had seen in his imagination the stateliest of pleasure domes. How to set-back a tower and keep it from looking like an after-thought: this had been holding up the design on which he had worked all week. It must go in a mass, solidly from the ground—the fundamental earth. Suitably, there should be no springing up, lacy like the Giralda Tower, in this city which grew around him, piling above him, unlike anything the world had seen before. There must be no more erections resembling factory chimneys, stuck for utility on top of square structures no better than a child might build with blocks. The city! What it would be, to build a city—one man to dream, and build, an entire city! He hummed to himself, as he did when ideas were fluid light, and not slow lava which only moved for a short time before hardening. There were dreadful days when his ideas were murky, black days when he doubted his ability. To draw—to envision the city of the future—he had needed peace and a reasonable seclusion, and at the same time he had needed the gratification of his heart and of his senses; and all of this Eva had given him, he assured himself as he hurried to the little house. Two hours before dinner, and after dinner the night ahead; and by tomorrow he would have his building, perfect, and suitable, modern and yet old as the world in purity of intention, reduced to black lines on white paper. He sang, whistled, and hummed through his teeth.

“He was off key,” she explained her subsequent behaviour. “He has no ear.” She had called out to him: “Have you got to make that noise?” She was working; in the pauses of his yelping, he must have heard the clacking of her typewriter running along on a more insistent key. From any inner joy, she reminded me, she was always quiet as a mouse, life itself seeming to hang suspended for the work which went well. But he howled cheap tunes while his charcoal slid over the paper greasily slinking and sly. “I simply cannot understand how he can do it!” moaned Eva to me. “It makes me doubt that he will ever be a great architect.” She had had much ado, she said, to keep from moaning aloud. And without warning he had come playfully into her study. “Playfully, mind you! And after having brought me to the verge of collapse!” she had not glanced up. “Do stay out of here,” she muttered. He mildly enquired what was the matter. She acknowledged that she then spoke in a voice sharpened by her fury. “If you don’t stay out of here when I’m working——!” Bent over her typewriter, she was always cold and concentrated, and her mouth was rigidly a part of a marble face.

“He came across the room and tipped my chin up,” she told me indignantly. “When I was working! I said I wished he would keep out of my sight. I said it over and over because he merely looked at me.”

“Why did he ‘merely look at you’? Was it displeasure? Because, really, Eva——”

“No! No!” She was impatient at my interruption. “He has a way of ‘merely looking’.” He must have realized that in truth she was not at the moment thinking of him as a being: he was an accident, of the weather, of the fading daylight, of the world which persisted in stinging her. But the unfortunate creature was a man, and he forced her face back and bent to kiss her. “That—for—your—work!” it seems he said; she was not clear about it, but she insisted that he said something banal. She preserved the rigidity of her frozen face when she leapt to her feet. And this cold face, this pair of eyes that conveyed no hint of her ever having loved him, brought him to a cool judgment of her attitude. He said: “So! That’s the way it is!”

She said that she was aware of her face shattering into agony. She began speaking very rapidly. “You don’t deal in words. You can always return—at once—to your work. You can pick up that piece of chalk and go back to your lines. But the word—the right word—it’s always dodging us; it’s always out of our reach; it’s the elusive essence of art. My God!” she told me that she broke off with; “everything intrudes!”

She told me that he was a Dutchman, through and through. “He can’t possibly fly off his head. He glares. He asked me what I wanted, anyway? Did I want him to sit in the hall, like a lackey—he would say that; his mother would have said it—not to speak, not to move, not to—exist, by Jove!—unless I pressed a button? He wound up by remarking that I was asking a good deal of him.”

She glanced helplessly around her pretty room. What, after all, was a woman’s work? This, she gathered, was his estimate. It is something with which she is permitted—by her husband, and also, he admitted, by the dispensation of providence—to wile away her idle hours; and it could never be seriously considered in the arrangement of a household. She was sure that his feeling was that this was his household, she his wife: it was the feeling of property, of which, she acknowledged, she had accused him at the end of all their quarrels. She seems to have brooded over this after he left the room in dudgeon. At any rate, she wound up by following him to his own room, standing in the door and making a speech to him. “What do you want, if we come down to it? Why on earth didn’t you marry Gertrude Cuyler? She wouldn’t have objected to your kisses when her mind was at work, because she hasn’t a mind.” She came back to it: she said that the quality in him which invariably egged her on to saying more than she had intended saying was his trick of silently looking at her. “He looks! He, merely, looks!” She said that she was thinking to herself: “He should take me by my back hair and sling me around.” She said that, standing in his door, she came to the realization that she wanted him to dominate her, and she knew that she would want to kill him if he did. She wanted him to be more brilliant than she, and she knew that it would be frightful for her if he were.

She broke her narrative to tell me that his hair was ruffled like a terrier’s. “You know how I adore terriers?” she interpolated. It occurred to her to think of describing him as he looked now to her softened eyes. But she knew that the words at the back of her head would not today come at her bidding: he had done this to her. She said to herself: “I give up!”

To give up to Nicholas meant that he took it for granted she had given up in everything.

What was the use of experience, if one could not find the words for using the fruits of it in one’s books? Those prismatic words that had glittered in her brain were gone. She had, at the time, made a frenzied plea to her mind to remember. She seems to have spent the better part of an hour at her writing-table, although she told me that it had been a spiritual lifetime; Nicholas had faded—dimmed—gone into the past; and she was a novelist who used words to portray emotions. She was in despair. She told herself that creation is of two kinds, that of the mind and that of the body; if she wished to use the creativeness that came from her mind she must be careful how she prostituted it. Resentment flared up against him. She should be on her guard against him, if she wished to save the integrity of her work.

I interrupted to say that she was trying to sublimate herself; and as I spoke I wondered if she had come into the world sublimated. She paid no attention to my comment, but went on to tell me that she had finally gone back to his room and explained all of this to him. That is, she amended with her little gurgling laugh that was so much lower in pitch than her voice, she had tried to make him see, but—naturally—he had been unable to look at it in her way. “I do believe the silly man is jealous of Spencer Mapes!”

“Why do you think that? How—” I enquired witheringly—“how could anyone be jealous of Spence?”

“I know he is,” she told me, “because he is forever saying he isn’t. But that isn’t of the slightest importance; why did you take me up on it? I was going to tell you about the prophets crying in the wilderness ‘Repent ye!’ Nick’s crowd make the summer and the winter noisy with their clamour.”

“You don’t think, then, that our crowd cry in the wilderness?” I was unable to resist this dig at Eva, who, with her horror of realism, had the most amazingly fatuous outlook on her immediate surroundings. She vigorously denied the possibility. “Ah you are hopeless!” I sighed.

“But you were born a pessimist,” she pointed out.

I dropped it. “You were going to tell me of some interference on the part of—which of your husband’s friends was it?” I asked with resignation.

She laughed. Hers was never the coarsened laughter of those of us who had a wider view of the meanness of life. Her merriment tinkled, without a touch of childishness. It was the detached amusement of the fairies. “Not interference, darling: comments. Comments on whatever Nick and I decide to do. In this case, my last summer’s trip to Europe. They share Nick’s obsession of the decency of a husband and wife being continually seen in each other’s company. I went in to see my mother-in-law, whom I adore; and I overheard this attack on me.”

“You mean, you listened?”

“I mean just that. Did you never listen when you shouldn’t?”

To everything that had been told me about Eva I had listened; and this, while not eavesdropping, was prying. I contented myself with “What did you hear?”

“They were drinking tea. It’s a rite in the good old manner, at my mother-in-law’s. The Ingoldsby sisters and Mr. Tappan Tillinghast—isn’t that a delicious name, Dinah, if one uses the sonorous whole of it?—sat politely, watching my mother-in-law handle the fat silver teapot. She has the grand manner when she pours tea; and she’s intelligent enough to know it and to therefore cling to the custom—although I believe she would scorn to play to the gallery of even her intimate friends. It was delightful, and I stood around the door jamb and admired it.” This was the only excuse she offered for her nefarious act.

She made me see it, as she had seen it from around the door jamb. Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had sat looking at the elder Miss Ingoldsby. He gave the illusion of sitting, as now, his small head thrust towards her and his mild eyes respectfully adoring her, for a greater length of time than the lady would care to admit; and Miss Augusta had for years pretended, as she pretended today, to be in ignorance of his regard for her. His long hands, loosely clasped, drooped between his elegant knees. Eva said she was convinced that the criticism he now made on Miss Augusta was his first: “I think, Augusta, that you’re hard on her.”

The elder Miss Ingoldsby drew her handsome form up to its full display of well preserved opulence, while her clear skin flushed with annoyance. “And why, pray, do you think such a thing?”

Eva said it was evident that he would deprecate any point of difference between them. “Ladies understand each other,” he seems to have murmured like a poltroon. Thus released from supervision of her admirer, the elder Miss Ingoldsby turned upon Mrs. Van Suydam the fine flame of her substantial backing. But Mrs. Van Suydam’s eyes clung persistently to what her hands were about. She stated firmly that she had expressed no opinion. “That,” Miss Augusta had then criticized, “is where you make your mistake, Lavinia. You hold off from directing these two young people. If you would listen to me——” And the younger Miss Ingoldsby had then incontinently burst into giggles. She clapped her plump hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes at her sister’s confident face. “How can Lavinia have a word to say about it, when it’s a question of Nicholas’ wife running away to get out of having a baby?”

“So that has come up!” I interjected. “I’ve been wondering when it would.”

“Oh, it bobs up like the spring flowers,” said Eva lightly. “But it wasn’t a remark that went down at the Van Suydam establishment. Miss Augusta bristled. She spoke from her chest when she said ‘As a topic of conversation between unmarried ladies and a gentleman, I should scarcely select that of—of——Ahem!’ With intolerant delicacy she dropped out of the chat the future of the Van Suydam family tree. ‘Enough!’ she decreed, when Miss Lois again pried into my affairs.”

Bored by desultory chatter, Eva talked as she wrote, painstakingly although with unusual rapidity. I saw the room into which she peeped, the hostess pouring tea with her nice attention to details. The open windows admitted the first soft air of spring; outside was Washington Square in its new raiment of pale green leaves. The setting sun cast lances of yellow light through the branches of the gnarled old trees. The winding paths were thronged with excitedly jabbering Italians, who made way for their children on roller-skates and closed in again like the sea. Even with this breath of outdoors, and with the room gay with cut hyacinths, Mrs. Van Suydam’s house smelled of lavender, of lemon verbena, and of dried rose leaves. “I always say that your house is the only place left in New York where I feel at home, Lavinia,” had almost sighed Mr. Tillinghast. His faded eyes became quite vacant, as if he looked inward at his memory of another house, now, alas, fallen. “Did you ever think that houses may have souls—souls as individual as our own immortal souls?” He was of a generation not ashamed to speak openly of the immortal soul which they took for granted resided temporarily within their mortal bodies. “Don’t you think the call of a house like this is a loud call? I sometimes wonder if Nicholas hears it—yet?”

“Wasn’t that too adorable, Dinah?” Eva interrupted her story to ask. “He so fitted in with the smell of lavender. And Miss Augusta briskly called him to task for being impractical. There’s a man who adores a woman in the right way! He said to her that when he spoke of creeping age he alluded only to himself! I almost ran in to hug him; but I thought I’d best wait and see what else they had to say about me. I could see that I only stood knee-high with the Misses Ingoldsby, who went into a squabble at this moment. They wanted to know why Nick was staying behind, permitting me to go unattended to Europe. They took the position that poor dear Nicholas couldn’t afford to go; and they left it to be inferred that I was bankrupting him. Miss Augusta threw a censuring look at Mr. Tillinghast and announced that I am far too pretty to go traipsing over Europe alone. ‘I never—’ she said—‘did trust Frenchmen.’ She sank into deep thought and open doubts. She stirred her tea, efficiently crushing the slice of lemon with her spoon and avoiding the splash that a more frivolous woman would have brought about. ‘Ahem!’ she finally produced triumphantly. ‘I could have told you the line to take, Lavinia. I’m very fond of young people, and have given time and thought to their ways; and I know that they need the guiding hand of more experienced persons through the pitfalls of their life together. One must gain the confidence of young people. Do you think that if I were to talk to Eva it would do any good?’ ‘I think,’ said my mother-in-law distinctly, ‘that it is none of your business.’ ‘Well!’ snorted Miss Augusta, sitting back in her chair. For my part—lurking in the hall and beginning to think what I should say if Miss Augusta did give me a rowing up salt river—I wanted to clap my hands when Miss Lois remarked to Mr. Tillinghast ‘Gussie talks too much.’ I walked in on them. I was very nice about it. But they were scandalized at my having listened.”

I was having a splendid time. “How about this matter of a child?” I asked, to keep her going.

She became merry over it. “It all came out of my leaving Nick alone in the summers. Poor old Nick! He’s sentimental. After the first summer, he told me that my study had gleamed with coppery flashes of a threat. The summer is dreadful, in New York, isn’t it?”

I laughed at her. “Had you no remorse at leaving him in a caldron?”

She said that she always arranged the house beautifully for him, with dust covers gay as a summer resort. The window-boxes, she stated virtuously, were festively in bloom. And there was always Mattie to see to his comfort. There was no excuse, beyond his sentimentality, for the habit into which he dropped of staying late at his office. Mattie had reported that he never came home to dinner. However, his explanation, given to Eva upon her return in the autumn, was the point upon which her sympathy for his plight laughingly rested. The fact that construction of the new city went on relentlessly, undampened by the weather, meant nothing to her; the fact that he worked under pressure brought forth from her the comment that American men were almost revolting in their frenzy over their drab business; but when he told her that he could better conceive of the ultimate in height when gazing from the high windows of his office at the panorama of the city by night she understood. Somewhere in the jewelled pattern of this city surrounded by water there lay, also brightly jewelled, the inspiration that he had felt to be failing him. Until the squares of light that were windows had turned black, he told her, he would lean from his own window and look down on this fabric of the latest assumption of man.

I interrupted: “Are you putting this into his mouth?”

She shook her head. “No. Isn’t it amazing? Why, it’s poetry, Dinah; and he’s just an ordinary sort of man!” He dreaded returning to the house, and every night put off until a later hour his dismal acceptance of its shadowy taunt. A man’s home—it was so dreadfully evident that Nicholas’ dominant instinct was that life must bring him a home—should be the expression of his hopes; but in this small house there was loneliness and a sense of frustration. It did not speak of the establishing of a family: there was no sound in the house. He had found himself listening to the Italian families as they straggled past on their way to bed; the lifted voices of the parents, wrangling with their children, began to be the deep voice of life. It brought what he supposed was a bewildered smile to his face, to realize that he wanted children. “Do you see how he got it into his head?” asked Eva of me. “It was being without me. Poor old Nick!”

The second summer had not helped to clear things up. He had got into the way of going to his mother’s: Eva suspected her of staying in town so that she might give harbourage to her son. She had not said so; but she had the faculty of saying things by refraining from saying them. Eva told me: “I reminded him that in the big house in Washington Square there is no sound; and he came back at me with the statement that in every nook and cranny it conveys that it has always cherished the sounds of the private life of a family. She is still gospel to him. It appears that she walked around here with him one evening; and all those things for the solution of which he had delved through agony of spirit, all the things that—undoubtedly from his life with me—he had begun dimly to see, were contained in his mother’s simple denial of individual liberty. She said to him: ‘Leave it to God, my child. He is still able to manage these questions. He—and nature—always have.’”

Eva was one of those women who, even through hard work, with loss of sleep, are themselves so shining that before the man’s jaded eyes, in a gloomy New York room, on a winter’s day, Aphrodite might have arisen from the foam all iridescent loveliness. She had a way of smiling wistfully. Whether outdoors the sun shone or not, she had the sun in her hair. I was impelled to ask: “Tell me this: is he still in love with you?”

“Oh, my God!” said Eva.

“It’s a funny thing, though,” she resumed, after a pause during which she smiled secretly. “He’s jealous of my fame.” Fame is a word that, self-applied, makes me wince. But she said it simply, surely, and un-self-consciously. “It started at a reception his mother gave for me when we were first married.” She looked at me curiously. “What is the matter, Dinah? It’s disconcerting, to have you burble with your amusement when I can’t see that this is so very amusing.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m making no mystery of it. But I am getting slants—oh, very different ones, I assure you!—on practically everything you’ve done since your marriage; I haven’t seen one person yet who hasn’t at once given their version.”

“I apologize for my repetitions,” she said huffily.

“Oh, don’t! I’m crazy to hear what you noticed at the parties and the like. You have no idea how fascinating it is, to get all the sides of the prism.”

She had a divine disposition. I had never known her to sulk. By the time Mattie had come in with tea for Eva and a cocktail for me, and Eva had called me a toper and had reminded me that hard liquor ages a woman, she was ready to go on sweetly with her tale. “And besides,” she crowed over the others who might have told me the same thing, “they can’t know what I mean to tell you. Wait and see! I was nervous about that reception, for I didn’t know how the two crowds—Nick’s and mine—would get on with each other. And—” with her half-smile—“I daresay I wanted to make a smashing impression on Nick’s crowd. And Nick made me frantic by continuing to tell me not to be nervous. I’ll not deny that I was hateful. I loitered upstairs in the dressing-room until he came for me; and he began running down the stairs, holding on to my arm; and he said he was sorry I slipped, but that he had forgotten I had not run, and slid, down those stairs since I was born. He may not have intended it, but he was superior about it. Of course I was furious; and I said I had forgotten to powder my nose and went back to the dressing-room.”

“Childish, wasn’t it?” I wanted to know.

“Um-m-m. I’m not so sure. I did deeply resent his manner. Looking back on it, I believe it was his own nervousness. He was more afraid of his mother’s scolding the nearer he got to it; and he glowered, and muttered at me to know if I didn’t realize that it was unpardonably rude to be late at a reception given for one. He said those things weren’t done, amongst his mother’s friends. What would you have said to that? I said ‘I’m accustomed to doing as I see fit and letting people wait for me.’ I was sure he’d take it, and that his mother wouldn’t. And,” she cried tragically, “he laughed at me! Quite gaily laughed at me! He got over his bad temper, and stood on the stairs laughing at me. He said ‘Wait until you see them! Look here, my dear: they haven’t the remotest—’ Of course I knew what he had intended saying. He had been about to say that those frumps had never heard of me until I married him. And after meeting them—and having them try to run my life for me, with the coolest assumption of omniscience—I can believe it. Their ignorance, my dear, of what goes on in the world——! Well: I lifted my eyebrows. But he whispered to me ‘Be a good girl, won’t you? And look perfectly beautiful, for my sake?’ And I knew that he was dreading what they would say about me.”

Eva said that Mrs. Van Suydam was an adept at the oblique rebuke. She had an eye like a naked blade that cut through any defense and withdrew itself into the scabbard of an old lady’s control. She wore a black velvet creation by Worth, made—so Eva afterwards found out—by the same design when its predecessor had served its day; and to this severely plain frock her maid had added snippets of old lace. Eva began to enjoy it. The smell of dying flowers was through the house; and, bathed in this sad aroma, Eva’s friends looked artificially bleached, dissipatedly fagged, while Mrs. Van Suydam’s old cronies were the dried rose leaves in the ginger jars. Charles Glidden had hung around the elderly lady, watching her like a cat at a mouse-hole; Eva saw in his eye that he meant to use her in a book. The orchestra, having eaten supper, had begun that tentative picking at strings which, in Mrs. Van Suydam’s girlhood, had indicated the resumption of the romance of posturing before respectful young men who wished to invite to the dance. Mrs. Van Suydam’s smile at Glidden was almost coquettish. The richness of her memories had, while attenuating this smile, at the same time warmed it. Fascinated, Eva drew nearer. But Spencer Mapes, with his silent pressure of attention, went with her; he talked into her ear upon impersonal subjects, and yet she knew that what he said was aimed at her marriage.

“Take Hamlet, as an example of the behaviour of a man who comes at the end of a played-out old family. Hamlet—” expounded Mapes.

“Bother Hamlet!” Eva had exclaimed impatiently.

“—Knew that he should have been man enough to kill—and what did he do? He used foul language to the women in the case. If he had acted on his impulse, and killed——”

She surveyed him with a passing contempt. “Would you kill? I doubt if you’d even use bad language.”

He said: “The mind is my weapon.”

I broke in with “What is Spence driving at?”

She sighed. “Oh, dear me! Nick is eternally harping on that same thing! And he’s driving at nothing.” She reminded me that she was endeavouring to lay before me the case of Nicholas’ jealousy of her reputation.

“It must be because he is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned. It sticks in his craw, one might say, that his wife works along a line quite independent of him,” I explained it.

“My eye!” said Eva, to settle that. “He, as an architect, is jealous of me as a novelist.” She said that Glidden had started it by his effort to boost Eva with her mother-in-law. His dictum had swept the rooms, so that in the end they had thronged around Eva with this new conception of her in their eyes. Except Mrs. Van Suydam: she held tightly to her own notions. The old lace at her throat and wrists was no more redolent of a cedar closet than her notions. “You know how, at a thing that has taken you aback, the muscles of your face slip, you think, for the rest of your life? Hers had slipped, at the shock of finding that there are those who consider me greater than the Van Suydams, into the inflexible front that she meant from then on to show. She, simply, won’t acknowledge it.”

In fairness to the absent Nicholas, I suggested that possibly he had had no pang of jealousy.

She gave me a long look. “I saw his face. He said to me—laughing it off: ‘A prophet in his own country, eh? A man’s reputation never exists in his family.’ The cronies were coming up to say goodnight; and they said ‘Nick, we never before realized what a famous woman you had married. You certainly did look high!’ Of course, the next morning I tried to smooth it over.”

I almost moaned: “Oh, Eva! Eva!”

She looked surprised. “Why not? Don’t you think it was the kind thing to do?”

I started to say “Kind?” But she was so kindly sure that she had been considerate!

She went on: “Nick is simple, sometimes. He began on a certain shame that he had got up over it; and naturally I realized how painful it would be if he acknowledged all of it—I had an idea that he’d brood over it—so I brought the talk to an end. He gave every evidence, besides, of getting hateful about it; for he said something about it not being so bad with my work. ‘With your flow of words—your beloved words—what’s to prevent your turning them loose on your book—finishing your book?’ He said that when a man wanted to build the greatest building of a great city, and the thing escaped, the fantastic idea was always beyond him because at the front of the poor man’s head was trouble and on the vision of the poor man’s strained imagination were the knocks of fortune: what was a man to do, in such case? The Devil, he reminded me, had helped the architect who designed the Cologne Cathedral; but the devils who were poking their fingers in this pie were not helpful visitants. He overlooked, you see, the self-evident fact that his mother’s friends are the bad visitants.”

I fear that I showed my astonishment. “He was appealing to you for sympathy. You wanted his understanding of the problems—the agonies—of your work, and he asked you to consider his problem. Don’t you feel this?”

None with so glassy a surface as Eva when she refused to be halted on a line of thought. “He has a way of saying things harshly. I can’t bear harshness. When things happen that hurt your heart, your brain doesn’t work. I had had a bad night—hopeless agony of mind because I couldn’t recapture a dream. And I said to him ‘You can’t understand!’ If he had said something! But how was I to know how he took it, when he didn’t say a word?”

I began explaining as if she were a child. “He wanted to say ‘Will you kindly, mercifully, put it into words—say, out loud, what you think of my work, of my potential ability to do great work?’”

She burst out laughing. “Dinah, darling: Nick isn’t at all like that. He’s a Dutchman. He’s solid and calm to the point of being nearly phlegmatic; he’s—— No, he isn’t stodgy, bless him! He’s a dear.”

“He might merely be reticent,” I suggested. I knew nothing about him. But I judged him by other reserved men. This desire of his, to know the worst, was something that was now, and would always be, a thing that in decency he would keep from her. The reticences of life were one thing; they were established by form; but, beyond and entombed, were the reticences of the heart, and of the spirit, and of these a man found it impossible to speak. I said: “You must often have rubbed it in on him that you don’t think much of his ability.”

Her knit brow revealed her difficulty over this. “I don’t see why you say such a thing. Look here: I’m going to tell you all we said, that morning. Then you can see for yourself. I tried to let him down easily. I said ‘I knew, last night, that something had gone wrong with you’.”

I sat watching her face. It was difficult to believe that she had carried on her part of the conversation as she now reported it to me. She had, however, so phenomenal a memory for conversations that it was impossible to doubt the essential truth of her complete misunderstanding. “He didn’t meet me half-way,” she complained. “He was rather mean. ‘Let us not bring it down to a struggle between us,’ he said to me. I said: ‘You know that I believe in you, don’t you?’ He came at me with one of those hateful counter questions: ‘Do you?’ So I looked straight at him and asked ‘You’ve never believed in me, have you?’ He said—as if this were quite sufficient: ‘I’ve loved you.’”

“Why wasn’t it sufficient?” I put it to her. A man loves a woman, I explained; this emotion does not presuppose belief in anything about her, beyond her fidelity. His belief in Eva was founded on the evidence of his eyes. A man would argue that behind a face so sweet there must lie womanliness.

She bit her lip. She was losing patience with me. “You don’t try to understand,” she complained.

“You’re wrong. I understand only too well.” I, on my part, was losing patience. Usually, I lost patience with Eva towards the end of a long talk. “You don’t want love; you want adoration—little Bodhisattvas sitting at your feet.”

She said angrily: “I shall lift him!”

She was devastating. “You mean, you will jerk him up?”

“Anyone would think,” she advanced plaintively, “that you were in love with him.”

“I scarcely know him,” I said shortly. But my sympathy was shifting towards him. As he was trying to make up his mind to let his work stay in a background made so much the richer for her work, so she had decided to put the force of her will behind and push him up. This much was plain. And nothing could well be more disastrous.

She said: “He laughed!”

I said: “Why shouldn’t he laugh?” It was impossible for them to bolster each other’s courage. And besides, Eva had never needed an outside influence to bolster her courage; her belief in herself would always hold her up. I asked: “What had you said, to make him laugh?”

“I told him that I was going to help him.”

“No wonder he laughed,” I replied.

Eva said sadly: “He used to seem so proud, and so completely happy. His very arm felt happy, when he put it around me as we showed the house to his mother. He had forgotten, Dinah,” she said, with her sudden understanding, “that he had chosen between his mother and me.”

I thought: “Poor man!” What had the choice been, after all, but the desire of a man for happiness at any cost? And—again after all—what is it to love a woman, except in one way or another to shed your life’s blood at her feet? I said: “Oh—let’s drop it, Eva; shall we? Why should we quarrel over it?”

It was dark, in the street outside. I had forgotten to stop to speak to Mattie.

PART THREE

I

“Darling, are you quite sure you’re comfortable?” asked Eva over the telephone.

“You mean, because I don’t like a long-winded talk over the telephone?” I demanded.

“Something of the sort,” she admitted. “Well, then, now that I know you, too, are in a comfortable chair—I do think our expeditions from one party to another on New Year’s Eve were so productive of what you might call evil consequences that I must talk with you. And you are in one of your crotchety moods and won’t come down here. If you would be sensible and draw up a comfortable chair—or have you?”

I acknowledged that I was in a splendid chair. “What did you mean about evil consequences resulting from the New Year’s Eve parties?”

She was prompt. “You wanted to look at all sides of the prism; so you should wish to talk Nick over, now you’ve been out with the two of us in conjunction. By the way, Nick has changed his opinion of you.”

I said that this could only be pleasant news, since according to her account, recently given me, he had disliked me intensely. He had said to her that I had the remains of the great predatory nose of the Middle Ages; it was small but beaked, short and yet gave the impression of being too long. Eva reported that for once he had been clever in the way he put it: he had said that I was too small for my nose and my nose was too small for its type. “He really was delicious!” she had exulted. “Of course you don’t care what he says about you; and it is so seldom that I get the chance to quote him to any effect. I mean, he’s a man of few words. Sure you don’t feel badly over it?” I reassured her, and heard the rest of it. He had said that all things about me were just off something: my eyes were just off hazel and my hair was just off red; and that to wear my hair in a long and heavy bang was just off the right style for me, being at times too young for me and at times too old for me. “And, Dinah—” had then said Eva on her own account—“and this is my reason for telling you at all, darling—he said that all of this would be, merely, amusing, if your fingernails weren’t so often broken by the keys of your typewriter. I’ve implored you to give more time to beauty shops!” lamented Eva, sincerely grieved.

I asked lazily: “At what part of the evening did he change his mind, Eva? Because I remember that on the way to one or the other of the orgies I overheard him say to you that my head was too big.” I remembered, too, that Eva had flown to my defence with “She isn’t conceited.” “I meant her skull,” he had said; and had had the grace to flush when he saw that I had caught him out. “It was a joke,” he had said lamely.

Eva’s voice came over the telephone, clear and sweet and excited in retrospect. “Don’t you remember—” We went into every incident of New Year’s Eve during which our moods had varied with the tricky weather. The snow that with a gentle but deadly persistence swirled against my windows served to detach my attention from the mechanical carrier of Eva’s voice: we might have been once more in the taxi—Eva and Nicholas and I—on our way uptown to the afternoon party which opened the prolonged festivities of the day.

The park was white and phantasmal, the trees weighted with ice, immovable, no longer part of New York; it was silent. But from the sidewalk there rang out on the frosty air the cries of children who snowballed each other. The taxi went muffled in a world of little treble voices; and through the early winter dusk the street lamps now pricked the way.

Nicholas’ spirit was cleansed by the sight of his city. He said: “When we come back, the lights in the windows will give us the silhouette.” He sat peacefully, a smile on his lips and glory in his eyes. I wondered that Eva did not see that this was pure delight. I wondered if he had it in him to love Eva as he so evidently loved his birth-place. “It’s magnificent,” he said, as if to himself. “There’s nothing like it.” For these white buildings were children of the womb of Manhattan. He peered through the twilight to miss nothing of the serrated mass, and I understood that his mind did not see that it was twilight, unless it was a twilight of the gods. His mind was crowded with the city of the future, austere, immense, but springing from the growth of the town and of man’s necessities, as all great architecture does.

Leaning back with her half-smile, Eva said with forbearance: “How can I be sure that you admire me, when you cling to your city? I am not of your city.”

He turned to her. “Admire you? Why—never before in my life was there the absolute! You’ve the great gift of beauty, Eva.”

She sighed gently. “No other gifts, Nick? I think I should like you to add the greater gift of intelligence.”

Laughing, he tightened his arm around her shoulders. “That isn’t worth a tinker’s damn beside your lovely face.”

She said: “You’ll spoil my coat.”

He glanced at me. “Isn’t Eva’s idea of sentiment an oddity?” Of her he enquired meekly: “Where are we bound for? I cling to my old-fashioned notion that I feel more comfortable if I know the name of my host or hostess. The other night—don’t you remember?—Molly Underhill screamed at a young man with a powdered face who was running as fast as he could to the centre of the gathering ‘Whose party is this?’ And the young man lisped ‘I’m thure I don’t know. I was bwought here by thomeone.’”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Eva.

He openly admired her. “Do you know, Eva, you can speak like a gangster—out of the corner of a rigid mouth! You have so many accomplishments.”

But Eva disliked being teased. She walked into the thickest of the party well ahead of us; and Nicholas was indiscreet enough to follow. I was to find, in the course of the night’s festivities, that he watched her with the same teasing smile on his lips that already had put her in a defiant mood.

The visiting Englishman was holding forth to a circle of cheerful spirits. “Do you know how to live, you Americans?” surprisingly asked the Englishman of these proprietors of the latest luxuries in the world. “Or do you live? Did you see the flea circus?”

Charles Glidden, owning to having seen the flea circus several times, requested to know if this chain of thought were kind. “Freye Remsen bought one—in a glass box—named Emma. Emma dropped her party manners in the home; the next morning she bit him.”

Freye Remsen’s eyes filmed with embarrassment. “What was wrong with that?” he asked.

Glidden enquired: “What do you object to?”

Freye Remsen floundered: “The way you said it——”

“Did Emma bite you?” Winnie Conant shrieked. “Simply answer that.”

“Well, yes,” acknowledged Remsen. “But what does that signify?”

The editor of “Walhalla” interrupted eagerly: “I’d like you to write an article on that for my magazine. Not over three thousand words. And—” he hastened to qualify his enthusiasm—“we don’t pay much.” He embraced the group in a flourish of an extraordinarily large cigar. “I think it will be splendid. Perfectly splendid. So typical of certain aspects of American life. Treated fantastically, of course,” His eyes danced. He had a way of speaking in a series of exhalations.

The party foamed. One ran across one’s friends and said inane things because in the presence of allies one rested, and encountered one’s enemies and said sparkling things because if one were not pyrotechnic it would look as if the last book had not done well. Outside the windows, shut behind their own drawn curtains for their own parade, everyone in New York pushed themselves through forced revelry.

Eva said in my ear: “Will you keep your eye on Nick?”

“What is he apt to do?” He looked peaceable enough.

Her funny frown, which furrowed her wide brow and would never wrinkle, was bent upon me.

“Trying to get rid of him?” I asked.

“You are so unaccommodating,” she then sighed. “Of course I’m not trying to get rid of him. But—you wait and see!” With this hint, she walked off. I came upon her later on at the moment when Nicholas himself spied her and turned on her so brilliant a smile of joy at sight of her that she herself laughed. “Nick—you old dear!” Eva’s love-making, half the time carried on amongst her friends, could as well have been conducted on the sidewalks, so impersonal was it. Sweet as honey, her eyes soft, she stood looking at him as a fond sister might.

He said to me: “In another minute she will disappoint me. She has a way of throwing cold water in a fellow’s face.”

She said impatiently: “You see, Dinah? All I want is to speak to Spencer Mapes; he’s arranging for Henry Pepperel to interview me.”

People coming in struggled with those who were leaving. Snatches of talk were cast upon the air and bounced back from the assault of other glass bullets. As if evoked, Spencer Mapes bobbed up, and, being an opportunist, utilized the accident of finding himself within hearing distance of Nicholas. He said to Justo Zermonte: “I think your idea for a caricature of Eva Litchfield is good. But do explain it again?”

Zermonte demurred. “It sounds so foolish; but I see her that way. I should do her with her neck elongated, and her mouth without human emotion, and her eye—just one eye showing—and looking, looking, so watchful for those who make a move towards her. I should take all humanity out of her. It would be the only way to do her—you see?”

I turned in order to inspect Eva as a stranger might. She would sail away, over the surface of a lovely reflecting pool, if one made a sudden ardent movement. Across the lovely reflecting pool of her absorption, she went away from Nicholas to lean on the piano and meditate. Her eyes were cast down, and her pensive pose, her lashes resting so quietly on her cheeks, might have hidden any line of reaction. With his incredible sinuosity, Spencer Mapes reached her side. I heard him say, as if she were protesting something that had offended her: “Hold on to yourself!” But I knew, as he knew, that she was pleased because she did not wish to be anything but the swan that sails away. I smiled at him, and for an instant his heavy-lidded eyes flashed amusement. Then once again he was bending solicitously and murmuring to her. “You see what is happening already? Your husband’s people are sapping your belief in yourself. But—forgive me? I had no right to say that. They are your people, now—so far as they will let you go with them. However, I can’t help remembering that I had much to do with making you—starting you on your career——”

She said nothing. She retained her charming pose.

“To see you treated as an experiment in sociology——” He seemed to hesitate.

I glanced swiftly at Nicholas Van Suydam. His high-bridged nose might be indicative of arrogance; it might be the outward sign of that inner spiritual necessity which urged his mother to live on in Washington Square, to drive behind a pair of horses, and to mope over Chinatown now lying along streets named for the branches of her family.

I thought that he had made up his mind to say nothing about an incident which must have affronted him. Or possibly he had not overheard. But his eyes were more brightly blue than ever, and this I took for a danger sign. On the mantle of the snow, which as we started downtown no longer fell but lay in unbroken white, he must have seen Eva’s head as Zermonte would caricature her. The picture so close to his mind’s eye that he was unable to see around it to Eva herself, he said with a forced gaiety: “We used to have storms like this when I was a boy. In those days, they used to last a long while; but this one may be slush by morning.” He expected no reply.

We had been accompanied downtown by Charles Glidden, who sat facing us and glancing indifferently from one to another. We were cross, and said little. I do remember Glidden wandering through a maze of words unlike his usual precision. “I was thinking of life. It’s quite a building, in itself—life. Take Eva: I’ve always been curious to see what Eva would do with life. She makes such interesting experiments.” And I remember that Eva cried out: “Stop it!” It was bitterly cold, and the still air bit and scratched at our lungs as if filled with the sharp white stars glittering above us in the hard blue sky. So still was the world on this eve of a fresh new year that we heard the snow snapping under the feet of the pedestrians. The taxi encouragingly labelled “Heated” barely melted the powdered snow clinging to our feet. Eva leaned forward and dragged at the front window. “Can’t you turn on more heat in here?”

The taxi driver’s head protruded from his great coat collar, and craned to blink at us. Clouds of frozen breath shot from his nostrils, and from his mouth as he opened it to reply. “Sorry, lady. It acts up like this when it’s cold weather.”

She at once began bewailing her fate. “Shut the window, can’t you, Nick? You might have noticed that it was open.”

The taxi bumped over unyielding heaps of snow pushed together by the street cleaners; we heard the rasp of their wooden shovels. “I must say, Nick,” she resumed, “that in so far as climate goes your town is awe-inspiring. If it were April, this heater would boil us alive. I don’t see why anyone wants to live in this town.” She glanced around at him. “Why don’t you defend it?”

I said to myself: “He may perhaps be a fool?” For he put a consoling arm around her and murmured: “There! There! The poor girl is cold!”

She lifted her eyebrows at Glidden, who looked interested but only as if he were at the theatre. She sat very stiff and unyielding, and said unreasonably that she saw Nicholas considered nothing beyond the city of New York.

His face close to hers in the comparative darkness of the taxi, he said softly: “Wrong! I care for you. But you’re such a cold-blooded young fish——” I watched him curiously: he must have wondered at the strong tug of everything of which he disapproved. His roots were deep in the soil of Washington Square: what matter that his flowering might come in the little house around the corner? He met my gaze, and said: “She’s prettier when she’s tranquil; isn’t she?” I began to like Nicholas Van Suydam.

“You see?” cried Eva tragically. She was looking at Glidden; she seemed to think that he was on whatever side she might select. He was leaving us, ready to make the perilous passage of the slippery sidewalk to his door; and he paused and looked from Eva to Nicholas with it plain on his face that he had started none of it but that he saw no reason why he should not enjoy the spectacle. I have never seen another man with so profound an interest coupled with so complete an indifference. The treacherous sidewalk was, in his eyes, quite as human in its attempt to upset his equilibrium, as Eva and Nicholas at internecine war.

Nicholas had recovered his poise. In fact, looking back, I think I never saw him wholly lose it. In his control of even his sudden flares of rage against Eva he was disciplined; in this he showed his kinship to his mother. He said, now, that he was hungry, and asked where they were to dine, and when. “Oh, Nick, darling!” she exclaimed. “You can’t possibly be hungry! We shall be nibbling at sandwiches all night!” His reply, that sandwiches were not food, brought forth a statement which she appeared to consider an explanation of all that bothered her. “You’re a Dutchman,” she let fall, definitely final about it. But she added—Eva always added: “So many things are more important than the question of food.”

The taxi waited at my hotel, the door still shut, while they argued it. “I can tell you this, my girl,” he propounded, “food is basically the most important thing, for on its supply and general excellence hinges what you have in mind.”

“What have I in mind?”

“Work!” He grinned at her. “To that, I’ll add love. And I should like to ask you how either work or love would go on, on a basis of artistic victuals?”

“I’m leaving you,” I interrupted firmly; for Eva was asserting, on a higher key, that he was a Dutchman. I left him saying firmly: “And what’s the matter with that? What’s wrong with Dutchmen? Who started this city, I’d like to know, if not Dutchmen?” Through the now closing door of the taxi I heard her, “I’m tired of hearing about it.”

I went draggingly through the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk hailed me with the abominable optimism of those who see the old year out: “It cleared up for the New Year, didn’t it, Mrs. Avery?” I plodded past the desk, my storm shoes flapping and my spirits going down into the melted snow with which by now they were filled. I took the elevator up to the new heights of Nicholas Van Suydam’s city. The curtains were drawn back, as only an occasional venturesome bird peeped in. The view at night was extravagant; spangled with lights heaped in pyramidal form, the city might have been the scene of Cinderella’s party. But, my mind inflamed by the supposititious plight of those of us who were encroaching strangers, I ran across the room and pulled the curtains together. Within the short space of time since my return the weather had again changed; a few flakes of snow, large as feathers, blew against the panes. Weather—and women, Nicholas would perhaps say, and be correct in saying it—changed with no apparent reason. Man was foolish to worry over either. Let storm, meteorological or human, come when it would, but let man keep his safe course.

I admonished myself: “James Pomeroy would say that living on the thirtieth floor is making a queer bird out of you, Dinah Avery. Get back to normal and hurry to the next party.”

But I was so late that when I went by for Eva they had gone without me. The desk clerk had telephoned to several cab stands before one of the wheeziest vehicles still in the business pulled up at the kerb, stalled its engine, started, and ran over the kerbstone and shuddered. Dubiously, I entrusted my life to it. The wheels spun industriously, but the short distance to the establishment of those two babes in the wood known as the Little Metcalfs took nearly an hour. The drifts were high and in the side streets would remain without the guiding shovels of the street cleaners until another day. It was a hazard, to get across the sidewalk when eventually I arrived. Snow banks gleamed under the light from the opening door of the house. I climbed stairs, fought through guests massed in the narrow hall, and stamped my own contribution of snow on the rugs in Yancey Metcalf’s gay bedroom. Another braving of the hall, where a misstep would precipitate a broken body down the well of the stairs, and I was in the large studio and already distinguishing Eva’s laughter. The studio was filled with her friends; and she hugged to her heart the desire to believe that humanity meant what it said.

Spencer Mapes met me; the glass of egg-nog that he pressed on me might have been brewed in the warm friendliness of his smile. I found myself seated with Eva on a black satin puff in the centre of the floor. We were telling Mapes that we did not like egg-nog and would take punch the next time. A very short time after, I heard one of us say to Mapes that the punch was so weak that we should like more. The Little Metcalfs flew about, picking smouldering cigarette butts off their rugs, rescuing glasses that bade fair to tip over on books which people plucked from the shelves. We wondered what they meant to do with the books; after the third glass of punch no eyes saw print. The room turned slowly, then faster, and we told each other that we were sleepy from the cold outside. Mapes murmured solicitously: “Don’t you girls want to go powder your noses?” We knew that he wished to get rid of us; but even the recalcitrant I had no intention of getting rid of him. And Eva giggled. “There’s Nick—and he’s tipsy!” Nicholas was shaking cocktails that no one had time to drink. A pretty woman said, her voice blasting one of the dead calms that occasionally fall on the best party: “Lucullus Kahn reminds me of a fawn with fleas.” We watched her husband scamper madly to her, his face a knot of apprehension. But Lucullus Kahn remained unmoved.

Spencer Mapes dropped down on the puff beside us. He looked sadly at Eva and said: “You poor little fish out of water!”

She said to me: “Do you remember what Nick called me?” and began to cry bitterly.

Mapes said again: “Don’t you girls think it would be a good thing if you went and powdered your noses?”

We told him that this was the last hope of all men who yearned to get women off their hands. Smirking at him, we pulled out our vanity cases and fixed our noses.

Bright fragments of the human race shifted, turned, twisted into tangled groups and rearranged themselves in patterns of craziness. A large police dog bounded from one forgotten glass to another, rapidly lapping the contents. And Eva caught sight of Nicholas once more and shrieked with laughter. “Nick! Nick! You’re gambolling! And it doesn’t suit you in the least!”

He said: “Didn’t you want me to be a bohemian? All right! I’ll be a bohemian—part of the way.” He appeared to be sober enough to know the point at which invariably he would stop; and at once demanded to be told how long she meant to let that fellow Mapes hang around. The agitated clinking of ice in the cocktail shaker which he still held made a tintinnabulation of ghostly menace. When we left, in groupings that had come about casually, even the police dog was tight; he lay on his back in the middle of the floor, ridiculously smiling.

Many people found themselves in one taxi. Nicholas enquired with resignation “Where now?” We said that we were on our way to Florence Quincy’s. “We can’t,” we assured him, “fail to show up there.”

“Why not?” he demanded to know.

We said piously: “Because we always go there on New Year’s Eve.”

Someone argued with the taxi driver: “Buddy, how about speeding up the old bus?”

The driver said on his own sad note: “Say, listen! It may be Noo Year, an’ de cops is slack fur de night; but I ain’t one er youse souses what gits let off. I got my fam’ly ter t’ink about.”

The taxi ran in and out, weaving, between the posts of the Sixth Avenue Elevated. We heard Spencer Mapes say that it would help us if we stopped at one of the all-night Coffee Pot stands.

Nicholas said: “So you’re here again? The bad penny. No: what I think you are is the dark angel.” He wagged his head.

Eva cried: “Oh, please?”

We climbed on high stools and urged the attendant to hurry with the coffee. We decided that the attendant looked as if he took his drinks from the Nedick Orange Juice stall on the corner, and laughed heartily. Nicholas counted the assortment of Eva’s friends reflected in the mirror behind the coffee urn, and counted us as we wavered on our high stools. The attendant apathetically swabbed the counter as we spilled our steaming coffee. It was all in the twenty-four hours of a day; and what to him was a snowy New Year’s Eve but extra slush on the floor? Nicholas asked him: “How many of us do you make it?” The man was not interested; he would check the bill by empty cups. “Strange!” observed Nicholas. “Very strange! In the taxi there were so many legs and arms that I feared we’d brought along the entire party.”

Someone down the counter chuckled—a fat man’s chuckle. We discovered it to be our taxi driver, telling about us to a friend who occupied the adjacent stool.

Mapes suggested to Eva: “Another cup wouldn’t hurt him.”

She said in a stricken voice: “I never before saw him like this.”

Mapes reassured her: “His sort of old stock, one might say, do everything to excess; they think it their privilege, don’t they? You remember what you told me he said about food?”

She leaned over to me. “I wonder, now, if I told him that?”

“Of course you did,” I scolded her. “The thing to find out is what you may have neglected to tell him.”

Our poet chanted: “I never saw such an amazing youth as this stage decorator chap! Look here, young Guy—were your parents Little People?”

Young Guy pouted. He did not know how to take this poet. Always, he had dreamed of meeting real poets. And this one was bald-headed, and his eyes danced mischievously. “Are you guying me?”

The poet went into ecstasies. “Hear him, now! He puns by way of starting the New Year right. Young Guy, where thou goest I will go: you will never lose me.”

Said young Guy: “Aw, shucks!”

The poet rolled his eyes to where heaven must be lurking above the embossed tin ceiling of the Coffee Pot. He said devoutly: “Thank God for this marvellous New Year’s Eve!”

Aghast, someone—I think it was I—said loudly: “It’s the New Year already! Listen!”

And the city blew up in hideous noise.

Throwing loose change on the counter, we rushed to the sidewalk. The trodden snow splashed our ankles as we jumped up and down and added our noise to the screams of every whistle in the harbour. We forgot our driver who still conversed in the Coffee Pot: he seemed, all at once, to be a sort of Father Time who came on the stage to cut off the head of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight. We commandeered a cruising taxi whose driver left his hand on the throttle of what the poet said thankfully was the most raucous horn in the world. “Never take your hand off that horn?” he implored the driver. “It enables you to stand out from the mob. You want to stand out from the mob, don’t you? Of course you do. It’s the ambition of every intelligent being.”

“Aw!” said the thug-like driver. “Can’t a feller enjoy hisself when he gets the chanst?”

The poet cast a benign smile on all in the taxi. “All human beings together, on this glorious occasion!”

Eva held tightly to her husband’s arm as the crowd of us, refreshed by the combined effects of the coffee and the long drive uptown to Sutton Place, crossed the sidewalk in front of Florence’s house. “I know I’ll have pneumonia,” she predicted. “But maybe not; we have the health of whales.”

He wondered, Nicholas said, if we did truly have the health of whales, which were warm-blooded animals in the wrong element. There was question of how to get into the living-room where, presumably, Florence Quincy stood to receive her guests. The man who had arranged to interview Eva, Henry Pepperel, wedged between two stout females and endeavouring to salvage what was left of his superior poise, called out to Nicholas: “You’re an observer, too, aren’t you? Do you fancy Miss Quincy is leaving me here, impaled, you might say, because I once interviewed her?”

Eva no longer leaned on her husband’s arm. She stood alone and sufficient unto herself. She said: “Watch me break through!”

Henry Pepperel crooned: “Oh, but you, Miss Litchfield—you can accomplish the impossible, naturally. You are one for whom crowds make way.”

One of the stout females advised her not to believe him. “He’s always kind until he starts writing his interview.”

We stood in the hall whence a stair with a delicate iron rail spiralled to the drawing-room floor. Behind us, amusingly, a fountain leaped from the wall and fell tinklingly into a shallow basin; and young Guy played with the startled goldfish and for the first time seemed at home. Nicholas still had Pepperel to contend with; into his unwilling ear the great interviewer dished up what he had found out from many years of the game. “Isn’t it imbecilic,” he confided, “that they don’t want to be interviewed unless it’s a grossly flattering spiel you turn out? And yet, they die like flies if you don’t beg them for interviews.”

I judged from his face that Nicholas was in a better humour. On the drive uptown Eva’s manner towards him had been intimate. She had enquired playfully: “Didn’t I see you—the chaste and elegant you—kissing Molly Underhill, down at Yancey’s?” He had rejoined that he regretted it. “She’s kissing everyone. But I’m sure it wasn’t Molly I kissed. Are you sure it was?” She had laughed, and had called him by her most passionate term of endearment: “Nick—you old dear!” He had been so pleased, so cheered, that I suspected this was nearly all he ever got from Eva.

Men and women shoved through the front door, stormed the stairway, and fell back on the little hall. I was washed up by this human wave to the slight protection of a console, and found that again I was pressed close to Nicholas. I told him: “I do feel like the wrath of God. I know now why men pulling out of a spree just pitch in and get drunk all over again.” I pushed my bang off my forehead, and heard myself say with deep emotion: “Oh—hell!”

Bill Metcalf came to lean against the console, and found me in possession and looked the other way. “I’m apologizing,” he said simply.

“For what?” Not that I cared.

“Yancey says I tickled you, down at our party,” explained the chastened Bill. “Yancey says she never saw anything so disgusting. She says you howled, and rolled up in a ball.”

I became indignant. “Why shouldn’t I roll up in a ball? I happen to be ticklish.” Out of a pensive pause, I added: “I don’t remember a thing about it.”

Bill fretted: “The point is, I don’t see why in the mischief I wanted to tickle you. I wish I could understand how I came to do it. It never entered my head to want to do it.”

Yancey, her vividly pretty face distorted by her resentment, bore down on the more or less homely faces in the hall. She started in at once: “What a night! Dinah, our place is all but demolished!” The big Englishman had sat in a newly upholstered armchair, and the armchair had creaked, had groaned, and had finally collapsed in the backbone of its structure.

At this stage, I appear to have wailed: “If it were only a chair that had been wrecked on the beach this night——!” I seem to have gone further, and to have confided to them all that I had a weak character; for here I was, at the tail of the evening and ready to drop with fatigue, and nothing could induce me to go home before this party broke up. In an effort to meet him half-way, I said to Nicholas: “This is how we keep it up. Don’t you see that we can’t help it? Why, then, come down hard on Eva?” I was indignant when he hit back at me with his idea that we did not keep it up; he had noticed, he said, that we were dropping by the wayside. The wayside appealing to me at this moment as a tempting deathbed, I leaned more heavily against the console and sighed: “I can’t follow out even a feeble thought.”

Someone laughed; it was James Pomeroy. He asked about the state of my soul; but it was my legs which were in a bad way, I told him. “What you need is to confess to me,” said Pomeroy. “What are your secret sins? They must be black, for I’ve never caught you out in one.” I said that we must have reticences. But I was studying the reticences of Nicholas Van Suydam, who stood amongst us and was not of us. His frowning concentration on the problem of Eva had been intensified by my remarks; he stood in thought, his eyes the only sign that he recognized our swarming presence.

Pomeroy said in an undertone: “I wouldn’t offer a penny for your thoughts: I know them. If you will study the life of the outsider, why don’t you take it lightly and get some amusement out of it? Watch how I do it—for instance.” He had brought to this party a young girl, Priscilla Swords, to whom God had given a face and called it a day, according to Molly Underhill. Her widely smiling prettiness made us uneasy, so that we had huddled away from her. Pomeroy said to her: “Darling! Act pretty for the ladies?”

Priscilla said sweetly: “It’s such a nice party, Jimmie.”

He said to me: “You see? It’s beautiful ingenuousness that redeems the casual stranger in our midst. Van Suydam hasn’t beautiful ingenuousness.”

One could never tell whether Nicholas had overheard what he was not supposed to hear, or whether from association with Eva he arrived at the same point in his cogitations that we reached by talk: he had a disconcerting way of chiming in. He said, now: “You’ve given me an idea, Dinah. Eva can’t help it. Therefore I am taking her home.” He pushed his way to the stairs, and was lost to our sight in the beehive of the second floor.

“I might as well go too,” I announced; and relinquished the console.

It was dreadful, upstairs. Florence, allowing all to kiss her, found time to tell me that she wondered what life was all about. Charles Glidden danced with a cream-coloured siren and, whilst clasping her with splendid histrionic ability, stared with his customary detachment at the various piquancies of the crowd. Molly Underhill languished in the arms of the young boy who had wanted her never to stop talking. Winnie Conant danced with her Addis, and called out to me: “I feel immoral!” I stood in the doorway feebly repulsing a powdered youth who wished to confide his ideas on taste; I was not receptive to Glidden’s suggestion, shouted to me as he whirled slowly past with the siren: “Get out and stick pins in people and watch them kick. Everyone kicks differently. It’s very amusing. The pins, of course you understand, must be mental pricks.”

Someone at my elbow said distinctly: “This is a brothel.” It was Nicholas Van Suydam. He had not yet found Eva. But through a rift in the dancing crowd I saw her; her face was as white and exhausted as all others in the room. Spencer Mapes made it plain that he looked after her.

I had again lost sight of Nicholas. I reminded myself that there was nothing I could do about it. And he came back through the crowd on the stairs, Eva’s wrap over his arm. He pushed Spencer Mapes aside with his elbow and held the wrap for his wife.

Winnie stopped dancing to ask if I were going with them. I said that I was not; I added, still more disagreeably, that if they were luckily let alone by all of us they might have a chance. “A chance at what?” asked Winnie skeptically.

From the head of the stair-well, Spencer Mapes looked down on them as they departed. Leaning thus over the balustrade, he seemed to embody in his lean dark face, in his intent eyes, all mishaps of the year just dead, all mishaps to come in the year just born; he might have been juggling the two years, watching to see how he might toss and catch the balls.

Thankful to be alone at last, I took a taxi and rolled swiftly down Park Avenue, encountering no traffic lights. New York was supine, played out by its merry-making. Dawn was in possession of the city. There is nothing so disheartening as dawn that is not rosy.

From a position of relaxation in my splendid chair, I was by now droopingly over the arm. But through the telephone came, sprightly and interested, Eva’s dear little voice: “Now, darling, that you’ve seen Nick and me together, what do you think?”

“I prefer not to say.” I was determined on this.

“H-m!” came over the telephone. I knew that she had drawn her small mouth into a button-hole: she did this when resolved on something. “Well, anyway, Dinah, you must acknowledge that he’s a heavy load to carry on my shoulders when I am with my friends? You see that he’s impossible at a party.”

II

I cautioned myself: “My good woman, don’t be partisan. At every opportunity, you’ve stated that there are two sides to a question. Why not, with your always well explained inquisitiveness, look into Eva’s husband’s side?” He was not so reticent as I had anticipated. Or rather, I imagined the truth lay between his inherited reserve and the trick of ready confidences which to a certain extent he could not have avoided catching from his wife’s crowd as if it were the measles. He must have been bewildered. Nothing of his mother’s training could have prepared him for Eva.

As we would say, I wanted his slant on Eva.

If one waited long enough, Eva played into one’s hands. I demurred at one of her demands to see me at once; I must, I told her, see an editor who was more immediately important. She suggested that I meet her at her publisher’s where, if I insisted on putting business in her head, she remembered she should go. She again asseverated the urgency of seeing me without delay.

I had no intention of meeting her; but I went—possibly from a fear that otherwise I should miss the key note. I went from a magazine editor’s office—where there were gay curtains at outside windows and gayer flowers on the desk—to the inner cubicle of all publishers: the waiting-room nicely calculated to break the nerve of the most recalcitrant. I found Nicholas Van Suydam already in waiting on Eva. He was seated on a comfortable sofa, but he looked half his usual size; even his long legs were shorter. The atmosphere of the cubicle was heavy with the suspended breathing of those on the rack, and Nicholas glanced furtively at persons whom he did not recognize but whom he assumed to be authors in various stages of expectancy. A young fellow clutched to his breast a manuscript that could only be his first. A frowsy female, by the force of her determination, held down a reluctant secretary while she pointed out the best passages in her book which was still in the relatively happy state of not having been rejected. The bored head of a department shared a corner with a gentleman who preached on the excellencies of a work that so far was in his head and on charts which he spread over their united knees. A small though firm woman said: “I insist on speaking to the young man who changed my commas in my last book.” Over the partition separating the cubicle from the main office there came the high-pitched irritation of typewriters. The activity of book publishing leapt the partition, and fell upon the heads of those who wrote books and weakened their stamina by its superior organization.

I said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to speak to me.”

He said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to see me.”

The fact that we had reached the point where in concert we laughed at his wife and my friend broke upon us at the same time, and we stopped laughing to curiously inspect each other. But I knew that he was going to tell me almost as much as she would have told.

He remarked inadequately that we had been seeing each other at teas, and as I let this pass without comment he continued: “You look like a meditative kitten. Have you been saying to yourself that I am a lazy devil? But I’ve always found late afternoon in New York a maddening time of day. I want to hurry home, and call out through the darkening house ‘Where are you, Eva?’ And Eva goes to teas, at this eerie hour. If I don’t go with her, I am assailed by loneliness. Dark, in the street outside. You know how it looks, down there, very late in the afternoon; I called your attention to it, the last time you were down.”

I remembered. Along the front of the apartment house across the street the fresh summer awnings had been lifted to admit the cool breeze of the end of the day, and through these unveiled windows heads thrust, and looked up, and drew in again. There was rain in the air, but it was across the river. I said: “You like to stay at home when you’re not working. But we reverse it, you see; we are obliged to reverse it: we stay at home when we work.” Everything about us was the reverse of all things about him. I wondered if he had seen it, for himself, and that it was at this he cavilled, in his mind, during his disputes with Eva.

He replied with his enforced light touch. “As to work—I spent a large part of today leaning out my office window and contemplating the city. Now, don’t, please, say what Eva would promptly say to confound me—that I had led her to believe I worked while at my office. There are times when a man must dream; and one dreams in the most tranquil spot. I would fulfill a better purpose if I sat in the park, or on Riverside, and absorbed the city rearing itself above me; but by doing this wise thing I should be flying in the face of the convention that a business man is always busy. A man, if a proper fellow, sits behind his desk continuously, a portentous scowl on his face and in his heart a mad desire to get off and go fishing. He’s the typical business magnate: the scowl tells you so. Always on the job—a man to be depended on.” He quirked one eyebrow in a way to which Eva had called my attention; I had the idea that he was quirking his eyebrow at himself because of more of an inner discontent than could be accounted for by his differences with Eva. And he then came out with an astounding question: “Do you ever dream—in private—you writing folk?”

I drawled: “At the last tea at which we met, I believe I remember Florence Quincy at the wailing wall: ‘Haven’t I the right to my privacy? Haven’t I the right to the time to work?’”

“All tosh,” he countered promptly. “It is in effect, the litany of literary people: ‘Oh dear God, grant me the time for writing!’ You aren’t angry, are you?”

I acknowledged that we were amusing. “Oh—I mean, unconsciously so.” I was, at the same time, acknowledging to my sense of fair play that I had not expected to find his attitude towards us so disparaging and that I had no right to object to what he might say.

“You’re a breed set apart, by your own wish, from mankind: what are your sources of laughter?” he asked with a faint uneasiness. “You nervously organized sensitives—to quote my wife—who cling together, working each other into tantrums, preying on each other, wrecking each other: tell me, do you like each other?”

I had no reply to this. I did not know. Through a perturbation set up by his question, I heard him explaining that we appeared unable to stay away from each other except when we were deep in slumber; we were, he said, banded against everyone besides ourselves. Architects did not feel this overpowering urge to herd together every evening. On the golf links, he had observed that lawyers mingled agreeably with men who were neither lawyers nor judges, doctors with men who might be potential patients but who had not yet fallen into their professional hands. His friend Anthony Bloodgood, to take an example, could bear it if the stock market were not mentioned during his hours of relaxation. But always amongst us, he averred, there spatted back and forth our technical discussions. “Do you never weary of it?” he wanted to know.

I murmured in extenuation that we did not always listen to what the other said; we waited our own turn to say something. In this way, I explained, we snatched a bit of rest here and there.

“Your private lives, in short,” he on his part expounded, “are lived in the midst of turmoil?” He was, I suspected, thinking of something that his words but overlaid.

I was proud of myself that I smiled good-naturedly. “You are in league with Mattie, then?” As he was frankly puzzled, I explained. Having finally found time for listening to whatever was preying on Mattie’s mind, that competent maid had almost sobbed to me: “Miss Eva’s got some friends what’s got looks like pizen. Yes ma’am, like pizen. But do dat stop Miss Eva from listenin’ to ’em? No ma’am, it don’t. Lordy, Miss Dinah, she ain’t got nothin’ but fancy sense. But she got a good heart. She’s jes’ like a little chile with a good heart, an’ belief.”

He responded to this eagerly. “She has a good heart! The things she does—Mattie knows about them; Mattie can tell you——” He almost stammered in his desire to put his wife forward in a light that he thought new to me.

I wondered: did he love her, except for her beauty? Because if he loved her for nothing more he would not hold her. As if in reply to my silent question, he said: “Even her imperfections are lovable.” But there was, in his fond tone, in his defiant eyes, a perplexity that he as yet denied. He was trying to change the foundations of his home, to make use of a term of his profession; but when a building is erected on the wrong plan there are two things only to be done: it can be put up with, or it can be razed. “After she went away for the first summer of our married life,” he continued his apology for Eva, “she wrote me that at first she couldn’t bear to look at her typewriter because it had come between us, you might say.” But Nicholas Van Suydam was not fatuous: instantly he began to laugh. “She said that the little white keys were teeth to devour her—little masculine teeth biting her heart. I say, Dinah! What I said to her was ‘Why masculine? Feminine teeth can bite.’ And, speaking of the summer—have you any idea of what she is planning to do?”

“None. But surely she would tell you?”

He said that she had begged him to guard her, during the remaining weeks of spring, from the intrusion of the world. “Lock me up, if I suggest going out?” she had requested. “Don’t permit me to go to parties?” He had had what he called one of his ardent fits; he had said to her: “There’s nothing I’d like better. I’d like to think of you, all day, as safely at home waiting for my return. There’s happiness for a man—to know that the woman he loves is watching out the window for his return at night—waiting for him, beautiful and sweet, at the end of his day in a man’s rough world. Oh, Eva——!”

I do not mean to say that, when telling these scattered incidents of his life with Eva, he at once launched into the extended and shameless dissertations which I time and again quote. Rather, he told his story by his halts, his uneasy frowns, his jerky flaps of his hand which were in some strange way appealing; had he not been of my own generation, there were times when I should have felt maternal towards him. But I have not Eva’s camera-like memory for conversations, and I have had to put into words those things that partly I read from his disquietude.

He went floundering along. “She says things, sometimes—at home—— You see, if it weren’t for these things she says and then, evidently, tries to retract, I’d be so much less crazy about her. Can you see how that could be? She said, the other day, that something is happening to her, in her mind, so that at present she doesn’t know much about herself.”

“She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.

“She put it down to a real reversal of values. She thinks that maybe she will get her bearings; and maybe not. She said she had found out that one can’t force issues.” I judged that he had been rendered uneasy by this. He had dimly perceived a change in her, so that her words had been merely a confirmation. At times, during the last few days, she had looked as if the breaking point with which he had frequently threatened her were close at hand. This morning she had asked him to meet her here; and he had demurred, because he thought it unsuitable for him to intrude on her business relations. She had, he assured me, all but begged him to come. “She said—it’s so foolish to repeat it!—but she did say that she had about found that her need for me was not so much—— I do feel that I’m drivelling!”

“Go on,” I encouraged him. “I’m tremendously interested. And do remember that I’ve known Eva longer than have you.”

Thus urged, he fixed his eyes on a distant object—it happened to be the frowsy female who still expounded the salient points of her book—and, virtually, plunged. “You know, then, how carefully she chooses her words—it’s almost as if she had got them on paper, she’s so sure—so that what she says has an added weight of truth? She said ‘I found out, lately, that my need for you is not so much physical as it’s spiritual.’” He laughed a little, and asked if I considered this a complimentary remark for a wife to make to a husband.

“From Eva? Undoubtedly.” I left him in no doubt that I was positive about it.

“I didn’t think of it in that way,” he then acknowledged. “I could think of nothing besides what I put to her—a hot demand to know what the devil she meant. I do feel apologetic for telling you this,” he broke off to say. “I must be catching your literary urge to tell all.”

I overlooked the slur to again beg him to proceed. “I’ve been away so long,” I told him, “that I myself know little to tell, and possibly—undoubtedly—should tell it if I had any store of knowledge. But, seriously, I am fond of Eva; and I want to hear everything that you’re willing to tell me.”

He gave me a quick look. I detected an added stiffness in his manner when, after thinking it over, he complied. “What she said next is really my reason for bringing up the subject. I’m aware that you’re a friend of hers, and I feel on my own part that you can be trusted.”

This I could take only as a rebuke, although he was unaware of its hitting me hard: he had no way of knowing that I had been up to what I could only call ferreting. However, my qualm of conscience did not prevent my listening eagerly to what he had to say.

He told it with his hesitation augmented by the length of time it had taken him to make up his mind. “She replied in a way that was no explanation. She said ‘The sad part of it is, Nick, that no matter what happens everyone will be sorry for you. No one will be sorry for me. And yet, it seems to me that somebody should be able to see my side of it. Somebody should be sorry for me. It’s very little to ask—that someone be sorry for me.’ I’m sure that this is, word for word, what she said; it made such a peculiar impression on me that I can’t forget it. Her side of—what?” He had, I made out, come to this question in his talk with her; for he said that he had eventually asked her bluntly: “Then, if you don’t want me, what’s the matter with me?” And she had asked: “Is that beyond a man’s comprehension?”

This was so characteristic of Eva that I enjoyed it heartily. It was possible to talk in private, in this waiting-room: no one so much as glanced at us.

“You will see, in a minute, that I went into telling you this rigmarole because it bears on her as yet unspoken wishes for the summer. You see, I shouted at her. There are times when she makes a fellow feel that there’s nothing left but to shout at her. She has that dear little smile that’s the most withdrawn thing in the world. I think—” and he too enjoyed it—“that if once I brought myself to the pitch of shaking the breath out of her I’d get my bearings. And at the present time, I assure you, I am away off in my calculations.”

Again it had helped, that we had shared our amusement. “What did she say when you shouted at her?”

“She withdrew!” His baffled shake of his head was comic. “And then she announced, as a result of her cogitation, that she didn’t really believe she wanted a man at all. You see? She started in by almost making love, and she swung around to a statement like that—to her husband! The fact,” he added slowly, “that I fail to understand a thing about her is a constant fillip. I mean, I am crazy over her. I never saw her equal.”

I suggested: “You can’t get around it that she is Eva Litchfield.”

“Which doesn’t mean a thing,” he said heatedly. “I don’t stop to remember that she has sense. In fact, I often doubt that she has.”

“You don’t see that side of her?”

“Do you?”

“Yes. How can you fail to see it?”

He shrugged this off. “I was—I think, at any rate, that I was—going to tell you how I came to my suspicion that she’s planning something in the way of running off again, this summer. And I wanted to ask if you couldn’t arrange to go to whatever place she selects?”

I replied promptly that this was impossible. I added, significantly, that I had my own work to consider.

He looked at me with more sympathy than he had yet shown. “Exactly! She’s a devastating influence on another’s work.”

“You’ve felt this?” With no right to ask, I still was determined to find out.

Properly, he ignored my question. “She said that she was so crowded in her life—she had so little room in which to work. This was, simply, making excuses—laying the groundwork of her plan, whatever it may be. She said that a man and his claims—his mere presence in the house—held her down, cramping her spirit, injuring her work. If she had wings, she said—and she acknowledged that possibly she hadn’t; she said she hadn’t had a fair chance to see if they would grow—the claims of a man would clip them. This was ingratitude, Dinah. I make myself scarce around the house when she’s working. And besides, all day I’m at my office. I called her attention to this.”

“Shouting?” I enquired, to ease a tension.

His laugh was a bark. “I did. She came back at me, however: she said that I was in the air around her. That she knew I was in existence. That this crowded her—that I was in existence!” His face was clouded with masculine, perplexed resentment. “I said, to this, that I’d be damned if I believed she knew what she wanted out of life. And I asked her, point-blank, what she did want.” He cast at me a shame-faced smile. “You know how she gets you when you’re angriest? With just one little childlike word? She said ‘Wings!’ I assure you, I melted!”

In deciding to catechize him, I had not bargained for so much. I was overwhelmed by these riches of confidence. His outburst, almost popping from his lips as if a cork had been drawn from a soda bottle, and incited by the titillation of the clicking typewriters across the partition, came more easily to a comparative stranger. I only hoped that he would not fly to the other extreme by the next occasion when we should be thrown together. He had so shaken himself by his recital of this scene with his wife that he now swept into a confession as embarrassing for me as it would be for him when he came to think it over. It was a queer state of affairs: both of them working, and each doubting the power of accomplishment of the other. He had said to her: “Suppose I came at you with a remark on the order of these you’ve been throwing at my head?” And she had replied carelessly “Oh, but, you know, you’d never feel this way because you aren’t made of the same clay.” This was what she thought of him; this was how she rated his ability. Nothing that he had accomplished had changed her basic distrust, nothing he might in future achieve would make an iota of difference. In this she was like a man, who can love a woman and at the same time believe her to be a simpleton. It behooved him to look into his mind, to weigh his imagination, in order to settle the question of her estimate before the power of her cool conviction undermined his self-confidence. Suppose he were wrong about himself? But, by acknowledging the chance of this, he did not in the least admit Eva’s conception of their relative standing: a man’s mind would be, necessarily, a better mind than a woman’s. If he had been able to think otherwise, the fabric of his life would have been at once unravelled. He thought it fortunate that he could hold so firmly to this one truth, for a suspicion of Eva’s superiority would have broken the image of his love. He did not wish her to be more sensible; he wanted her to be sweeter. He might shout at her to be sensible, but he wanted her to be foolish. He said—for a moment sheepishly a boy in love—that with her hair of so fine a gold that it was silvery, with her delicate skin so faintly flushed with rose, she had always seemed to him a lovely creature of the moonlight: no, she herself was the moon of his delight.

I said—cruelly, because Eva had accused him of sentimentality: “How could you have forgotten that the moon wanes, and is cold and not to be counted on to warm the house?” Before the eyes of his mind there should have risen the unnatural moon—large, and artificial like a stage setting—rising to look at the astounding city with a face of dead stuff.

He soared above my objection. “She’s so untouchable,” he said with admiration that did not now complain. Always when within his reach, she stood straightly upright; if she had had a less plastic body she would have given the impression of rigidity. But in her eyes he usually discovered a beam of playful fondness. “Dear old Nick! You will be foolish!” Even when telling me of it, he chid himself: so often he forgot her fastidiousness. He knew that a man must be careful in his treatment of Eva, ever bearing in mind her embarrassment in bodily contact. This, I gathered, he attributed to purity. Her notions often irritated him; but he acknowledged that he should make an effort to comprehend that she was more sprite than woman. He had had, at times, flashes of realization; he had seen with his conscience that if a man fell in love with one of these creatures of the elements, withdrawn into her life of the mind—if a mere man had plucked a star from the heavenly host and tried to domesticate it—he must make concessions of his own nature. Essentially cold and sparkling, starlight was not for the common terrestrial day. He had confused his metaphors: it was lucky that Eva had not heard.

I rose. “We are all as selfish as we can be,” I told him. “I’m so selfish that, even after your appeal, I still refuse absolutely to go with Eva this summer. And, if you are looking for a reason, what you’ve just said will provide you with one. Eva, without meaning to do so, tries that out on everyone.”

She came through the archway from beyond the hall of the typewriters. She was breathing rapidly, and her step was hurried and irregular. She said at once: “I forgot all about having asked you to come, Dinah. And I’m not in the mood to talk. Do you mind if we put it off? Come on: I feel like getting out of sight of this place.”

Fifth Avenue displayed the discreet gaiety of late afternoon. Florists offered window displays of odd and prankish blossoms. “Goodbye,” I said gladly.

But Nicholas took me by the arm. I suspected that he did this in order to avoid my eyes. He wished, he said, to buy posies for us. He said to his wife: “You look like a flower yourself. Your cheeks are red. If you knew how much good it does me, to see you look so healthy.”

She smiled at him, her eyes narrowed although not unkindly. “You should know that I can’t wear fresh flowers. They wither at once, if I wear them.”

His own smile retained his ardent admiration of her. “But I must buy you something? This beautiful day—and you knocking a man’s eye out with your charms—I must buy you something. What shall it be? There’s a dog shop around on Park Avenue; and on my way up to meet you I noticed a good little pup in the window-cage. He took my fancy. Shan’t we go and buy him for you?” He was kindness itself in the way he held me grouped with them. He held me, and looked at her as if to say “We are your staunch supporters, your ardent admirers, Eva.” But I felt that in his determined insistence on her beauty of appearance he was over emphasizing; architecturally she was perfect, and he believed in decoration for its own sake, but he seemed to dwell on it because of some other side that he wished to slur over.

“Don’t be so childish,” she said without rancour. She was a woman who followed one idea to its conclusion. I saw that she had something on her mind, and again I endeavoured to escape. But the traffic lights changed, and he rushed us across the street and in the direction of the window wherein pranced and yapped the good little pup. Late shoppers hurried in at doors, scuttling to attain the haven of the showrooms before closing time. Even now dusk was falling swiftly on the city. The shrill cries of newsboys knocked against the roar of the traffic, and from a phonograph shop we heard the sweeter shrillness of the “Peanut Vender.”

“Goodbye,” I muttered; and dodged through the automobiles. Eva did not notice my departure; she built a protection around her thought, hedging it in safely from interruption.

III

We looked as if we were prepared to say that we were beaten by the city. But in fairness we could not altogether put it down to the city that it had been a trying day—as our mothers would have called it, although we would have used a stronger term. It was the end of the winter’s gaieties, and the beginning of the hot weather, and what we liked to call the humidity had begun to roll in from the ocean and fall upon us. The pigeons wheeled more languidly, the sparrows fought with less ferocity, and even the gulls following the rivers up from the sea might have had no real hope so half-heartedly did they dip, and recover themselves, and go on their pilgrimage.

We came from a tea-party where our souls had been dipped in vinegar. For at the tea-party two of our friends had, as Winnie Conant put it, behaved like wild cats. We toiled up the stairs, from the last stop of the elevator, to the penthouse wherein we were to partake of an informal supper; and in a despairing effort to enjoy ourselves we trouped along shouting to each other, not a whit abashed by the heads of tenants who glared through doors on the jar. Divided by floors, our heads called to each other over the banisters, sophisticated cherubs with wings and no legs. James Pomeroy said in a stage whisper: “Call out the names of ‘us’ loudly enough, and you will start up a hue and cry; and tomorrow these people will buy your books. Never neglect a chance of advertising amongst the masses.” Slightly out of breath, but foppish in his use of his hands, he opened the question of a possible marriage with Priscilla Swords. Winnie Conant wanted to know why he felt the urge to do this revolutionary thing. “Besides, you have a wife,” she added, economizing her usual flow of words because of the ascent.

Pomeroy halted to adjust his eye-glasses. The narrow black ribbon waggled jauntily from his extended little finger. “Winnie—dearest!—don’t be literal? That could be arranged.”

No one discussed the recent antics of Eva Litchfield and Molly Underhill because they climbed the stairs with us.

The hostess unlocked her door, and we were at once in the most unique small residence in town. No one looked around. We wanted to sit in comfortable chairs and tell our thoughts. To this day, none of us has the slightest conception of how that room looks. It will always, for us, be swathed in the memory of knots of people who at once told all. I had a twinge of anticipatory horror when I realized that Florence Quincy had captured the chair next the one to which I dashed. The women were collecting in groups, hard at it talking; and I needed to talk to men. Our hostess lifted chastened eyes—the eyes of a nun with a past: “Oh, do you really think it a nice party? Oh, how good you are to me!” I said to Florence: “This woman will have us telling the worst about ourselves. We’ll do it anyway; we’re proud of the worst in ourselves.”

Florence was in a fractious mood. “There’s no way of getting around it—a spit of conventionality runs through me, pinning me to discomfort when I stop long enough to think. The thing is, not to stop long enough to think. Possibly I’m an invertebrate? When Molly Underhill and Eva Litchfield pull their scenes, such as we had to live through this afternoon, the spirit of Cotton Mather—or is it Jonathan Edwards?—not that it matters—seizes on my brain and I think that the best way to fix it is to drop a bomb in our next party and lay us all low at the feet of Saint Peter. If you can stop being a champion of Eva and her divine right to behave as she pleases—what did you think of it, Dinah?”

It had been a tea given by Molly’s publisher in order that she might read her latest poem to the usual scratch lot of people who would hate the poem.

Without waiting for a reply, Florence continued: “I acknowledge that Molly snivelled through her nose in high C, and that it was enough to make the gods revolt. But—and this is more to the point, naturally, for I’m a selfish woman and like my ease—it made me feel torn inside by screams I’m too much of an inherited lady to release, that Eva staged her scene as soon as Molly finished hers. I call it beastly selfish of her.”

“With both of them,” stated Winnie Conant, “it’s a case of suppressed sex.”

My attention attracted by a gaze full upon us, I glanced up. Charles Glidden looked at each of us in turn, between the eyes and not into them; he might have been a surgeon who had operated on these brains and was watching the reactions. For the moment seeing through the lenses of his analytical eyes, it ran through the minds of each of us, I daresay, that it was not a question of what was moral and what was immoral, because what we did was incited by our nerves and not by our emotions. His eyes—which might have had no lids, so immovable were they—seemed to say that men were the poor deluded moths flying head-on into the dazzle of electricity. What I had been about to remark fell into a dead silence; he disconcerted me. But Winnie was of a hardier nature: she asserted that only the surface of Eva Litchfield was vitreous. “Underneath, if she’d only acknowledge it, she’s a human being like the rest of us. But she would die sooner than own up. With Molly, the surface is quite ordinary, while inside—who knows? Therefore, she gives out that she is having one affair after another.”

With his smile, which might have been the outward sign of tremendous inner laughter except that it was without human mirth, Glidden said that this was no place for a modest man; and with his cold stare on us he might, in spite of his words of repudiation, have made up his mind to see it through, as he would, without weakening in his purpose of observing stripped emotions, have seen through all conflicts between living organisms from the flea circus to the circus of life. He said: “Do you like to peer and pry into the insides of those whom you call friends? I ask in no spirit of censure. But I’m interested in the workings of the mind of a realist. Why do you realists go the whole way? You may be said to tell all about your hero’s toe nails. It’s so disgusting. Who cares about toe nails? Eva, thank God, is not a realist.”

“Her work is almost precious,” Molly criticized.

“It’s actual beauty,” Glidden rebuked her. “What is the matter with you women, anyway? Why turn and rend Eva?”

Florence said indifferently: “I am cooling down; but by way of justification of my attitude I’ll say that I object to the implied but ever-present self-praise of the hedonist. Why should Eva take the position that, because she is Eva Litchfield, she is privileged to ruin a party? Naturally, I don’t acknowledge your right to ask. What a crowd we are, to be sure!” She lifted her shoulders. “You weren’t there when Molly read her poem; so you missed Eva’s dramatic ‘That I—I!—should have to listen to such words! Such ill-chosen words! It kills me! It kills me!’ If she for her part is going back on her friends——”

Glidden murmured: “Will you stand by ‘hedonist’?”

I was so weary that the chair seemed not to touch my body.

In the light of half the things she did, Eva appeared to be an unreasoning wretch. Influenced by her husband on the one side and by her friends on the other side, she occasionally—they thought—kicked over the traces and followed a line of her own choosing. But I doubted if her outbursts had their origin in suppressed desires: she seldom suppressed anything. Her actions were variable, seeming to spring from nothing more profound, more remote from the trivialities of daily life, than the casual speeches of her acquaintances. Most people are influenced by their friends; but I have seen no one so instantly changed, and so apt to be as instantly changed in the other direction, as Eva Litchfield. A flower has little root.

That her husband was genuinely puzzled by her I had not for some time doubted. Arriving at the tea for Molly, I had run into Eva and Nicholas disputing outside the entrance. He detained her while he stated his case. “Look here, you are a changed woman the instant you’re thrown with your friends. I never saw anything so peculiar. It’s a fit that comes over you. The fit—” he concluded bitterly—“is on you now.”

I had hurried past with the scantiest of greetings. As I reached the door of the reception room, Molly’s voice rang out above the noise of the already large gathering; it was like the unpleasant voice of a peacock. I craned my head around the guests who now, a receding tide, flowed back into the corridor. In the centre of the room Molly sat enthroned; and behind her, on the piano, was the portrait bust of Nefertiti. The experienced serenity of the plaster head, and the strained expectancy of the living head, confronted me. Two pairs of women’s eyes, filled with something above me, below me, behind me, stared at me but did not see me. I was appalled. The invisible laid hands on me, pushing me back with those who fled to the corridor. The voices in the corridor were pitched against Molly’s voice in the reception room. And the indescribable tautness of the nerves that her speaking voice engendered, intensified by the pressure of this receding wave of our friends and our foes, combined with the effect produced upon me by the eyes of Nefertiti and Molly Underhill and blasted me. I felt the imminent snapping of all control; and in the light of this inner turmoil I saw how good a thing it was, on Eva’s part, to let go in a so-called burst of artistic temperament authorized, by popular consent, if one does it with conviction.

With pure conviction, Eva almost sobbed: “I don’t see why I should be expected to bear it!”

And in the reception room, in the indifferent presence of Nefertiti, Molly suffered purely. They had not listened to her poem, she wailed.

I sank deeper in my chair in the penthouse: one’s friends could be hard to bear. Florence went on raging at Charles Glidden. “Do you blame Eva’s husband for leaving her in the lurch and going home?”

“Oh—by the way—” gasped Winnie—“what made him do it?” She gave me a sharply suspicious glance. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Dinah knows.”

I did. I remembered, in a series of sharp impressions, the horrid happenings of the tea-party. But I shook my head.

From behind muffling velvet curtains there had sounded the clear sweet voice that never failed to act on Nicholas like a call. It had come like the song of some bird caught in a hen yard. Nicholas had listened, rapt: it was a lovely sound.

So distinctly that I glanced in confusion at her husband, Eva had said: “In regard to my next book, Spence, I’m quite sure that the subject of passionate marriage can be so treated as to be without offense. I’ll put ecstasy into it. It should be treated as poetry and not as a study in flesh and blood.”

I had hastened to say to Nicholas: “She never has her feet on the ground. Bear that in mind. She will write nothing raw. She dislikes bawdy words.”

He had replied with profound disgust: “But in talking, she’d dissect the Almighty.”

I had slipped away to stop Eva before he should overhear more. She was indulging herself in an impersonal analysis of personal experiences. I knew that in her case experiences became impersonal as soon as she had stepped out of them. I heard her say: “I’ve found myself thinking, in the midst of tenderness, that there can be nothing in the universe without the right words to convey it. But I’ve found that the search for the words ruins the emotion. Life is so awful.”

Mapes had asked disinterestedly: “Don’t you offend your husband?”

I touched her shoulder. But she had said—impatient of the presence of both Spencer Mapes and me because we were not in the centre of her preoccupation: “I’ve often told him what it was that made me so thoughtful.”

Mapes had relapsed into his almost soundless laughter. “At times, I’m sorry for him!”

I said sternly: “Your husband is waiting for you. I think he’s ready to go home.”

She had turned away indifferently. “I won’t go yet.”

He had left without her. He must, however, have promptly realized that he had set his feet on another stage of a progress the end of which he himself did not yet see; for he entered the penthouse at about this time. Beyond an indifferent nod, she paid no attention. She had been over in a corner talking with Spencer Mapes, and they had been joined by Addis Wickersham and James Pomeroy; we had heard Addis Wickersham’s splendid voice intoning the service of literature. Over our corner a silence fell at his entrance. I suspect that the others were thinking, as I did, that Nicholas Van Suydam was in a position of minor awkwardness. If he himself realized this he gave no sign. He had a graceful manner; and on this occasion I frankly admired the kindness which actuated his attention to Molly Underhill. Since our arrival at the penthouse, Molly had lurked, prowled, and ostentatiously looked over the books, but had seemed unaware of the presence of her friends. Her wide smile of welcome for Nicholas was at the same time a challenge to Eva, upon whom she at once turned a triumphant glare.

The irregularly shaped, low-ceiled room was already thick with tobacco smoke, which wavered into a canopy over our heads, and joined the banked shadows in the ell, and added to the nervous discomfort of finding oneself in the silence of a penthouse. We would have sworn that we heard the silence. The various groups of people broke up, and formed again, and evidently gave it up as hopeless: they stood where they found themselves, waiting for something else. In this way, Eva and Nicholas were thrown together.

She asked lightly why truly he had come back, and shrugged when he persisted that he had returned because he was responsible for her. “You won’t stay,” she dropped, with as much acidity in her tone as she ever employed. “You won’t stay, because you won’t approve of this party more than you did of the one you so charmingly left.” She shrugged again when he replied that he had every intention of staying until she took her departure in his company. “As you please,” she agreed. “But I want to say this to you: you can’t play fast and loose with me, Nick. I don’t permit my friends to do so. My friends, however, have never wished to treat me in a cavalier fashion.” With a nod that was almost one of dismissal, she strolled away.

I hastened to say to him: “Have you thought about this room? It is packed, I’m feeling, with evil influences.”

“The people in the room?” he enquired.

“It’s—it’s—bad. The room itself. The city outside the room. Oh—the whole thing,” I finished lamely enough. But I started in again to keep both his mind and my own from Eva. “I go through this year after year, agreeing with everyone because it’s less troublesome than to hold opposite views. There’s so much talk, if one doesn’t agree.”

“But there’s talk anyway, isn’t there?” he asked, his manner that of one who knew the answer.

It was impossible to divert his attention from Eva; I saw them meet in the middle of the room. She seemed, in fact, to have been seeking him. “Suppose we go?” she urged. “I think there is going to be a scene.”

He responded to her appeal with “Then I feel sure you will stay.”

I heard her foot tapping on the floor. “I won’t make a laughing-stock of myself by hanging around you,” she flung at him, and turned on her heel and left him.

The scene which she anticipated started in by being, as usual, purely a verbal one. I got out of it by retiring into the ell of the room and settling with a book. If Molly Underhill stood pat under baiting, or if she flung back at them, was none of my business. But she brought the scene over to me, as I would not go to meet it: she ran to my corner and threw herself down with such abandonment to her inner turmoil that the chair creaked. In a passion of resentment she said through clenched teeth: “That taunt!” She almost flung herself at me as she talked aloud although to herself. “When I remember that, when I came to New York, these were the people I wanted to impress——!” As spasmodically as she had flung herself down, she leapt from the chair, snatched her coat and ran from the apartment: we heard the thud of her feet as she hurried down the stairs.

Nicholas Van Suydam said to several of us who stood stupidly looking at the door through which Molly had bolted: “She was crying. It seems a pity.”

Winnie Conant jeered: “Molly’s trying to live in a protracted emotional crisis. She gloried in the recent unpleasantness. Save your pity until she needs it.”

I felt Eva’s hand slip into my arm. “Help me out? Help me out, Dinah, for the love of God? I can’t stand this!” At once she continued, speaking imperatively to her husband: “Some of us are going down to the Metcalfs’.”

I heard him say in a low voice: “You’ve behaved like a wild thing all day.”

She pulled away from his detaining hold. “Are you coming, too, Dinah?”

He said: “Very well. I’ll drop you at the door. I shan’t go in. And let me say this, Eva: you’re being discourteous to our hostess, who doesn’t belong to the ‘union’.”

She said for the second time, and indifferently: “Do as you please.”

He told me, afterwards, that he hastened to undress and get into bed. He knew that this was to offset any weakening of his purpose, any qualm that might have urged him to hunt for Eva as she rushed through the homes of her friends.

IV

I saw Eva once again before the summer flight from New York set in for most of us. She went abroad with her husband, and I have always believed that this was the direct result of Winnie Conant’s party for women only. This party became famous as the Onion Party, and, we suspected, influenced the course of several lives.

I stopped for Eva, and Nicholas walked with us to the studio in Macdougal Alley. That they had not, at this time, come to an agreement about what had been brewing between them was evident during this short stroll. We started around the corner into Fifth Avenue in a silence that was a thick wall between the two. Across the street, above the mass of a terraced apartment house, the crescent moon hung in a deep blue sky. Nicholas struck his stick against the trunk of a lone tree surviving at the kerb; and it struck him, with the sharpness of the blow he dealt the tree, that he had sold out his birthright: why had he selected a profession whose present aim was to change New York? Why had he not been content with what he had always known? Why had his taste wandered afield? All of this we gathered from what he said to us in his resentment of disillusion. Eva watched him, I fancied, with amusement. “What is it?” she enquired with her air of detached interest in the contortions of human beings.

Promptly he informed us that the city was ruining us. Looking accusingly at his wife, he said directly to her: “It seems, of late years, to inculcate a love of money.”

“Who doesn’t like money?” she asked flippantly. Her flippancy, as with everything about her, even her anger, was dainty; her sweep of eyebrow took a more airy flight, her small mouth was prim: it occurred to me that in this mood she was more than ever dangerous to the peace of mind of this man who acknowledged that he did not understand her.

He said: “People—nice people—don’t openly bay down the trail after it.”

She said: “Oh, don’t they!”

He shut his lips down tight on a sentence that I was sure would have been “Not the kind of people to whom I’m accustomed.”

“As I said,” she smiled, “you’ve the instincts of your family. Dinah, do you know that they hold on to their belongings—in Nick’s case, it’s his wife—as if they were increasingly valuable lots on the island of Manhattan? I assure you, they look upon wives and children as ‘lots’.”

We had walked as far down as Eighth Street, and went through a crowd of those who, Eva said, thought of wives as valentines. The street might have been a penny arcade. Sauntering youths and maidens, for the most part arm in arm, interfered with the continuity of the dispute. But from Eva’s smile I knew that she meant to finish it. We turned into Macdougal Street, illy lighted and grimy; and she came closer to him and purred: “You are sorry you bought this lot?” She touched her breast with her hand. “Too bad! You didn’t select the lot in the fashionable section; eh?” She threw her head back and laughed: “Spencer Mapes warned me!”

He said stolidly: “We’re not going to quarrel, you know.”

“Ah!” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure of that, Nick. You’ve begun to insult me.”

“And you?”

They had forgotten me. I dropped behind.

She said quietly: “I’ve begun to be hurt.”

His voice was no longer firm. “I’m sorry.”

We had reached the Alley, and strove to keep our footing on the cobblestones of its pavement. Ahead of us, under a small lamp, a little terracotta god of love kept watch over the blue door of Winnie’s house.

“I daresay,” said Eva, “that this is the first time you’ve shown what you really think of me.”

“Eva——?”

“Here we are,” said Eva. “And, my dear, I can tell you this: I prefer my friends. Take that as you will. They have never so meanly criticized me.”

I paused long enough to whisper to Nicholas: “What could you have said to her before we started? You’ve—actually—hurt her feelings.”

He shook his head and went off through the obscurity of the Alley.

Eva and I stepped into a scene of feminine revelry; I had never seen the Wickersham library respond to so high a note. The note was sharp, as bright as parrots and as dubious as the talk of parrots. Thrown into relief by the sombre background of the books which covered the walls of the two-storey room were all colours and combinations of colours; and the firelight picked out folds of silk, and was lost in folds of velvet, and danced and flickered until there might have been even more movement than was the case. Wickersham was soliloquizing: “It no longer gives the impression of being the library of a scholar.” He appeared to be broken by the sight.

Eva said to me: “Men are the trouble, in this life.” Already her eyes were shining—because of Nicholas going home through the dark Alley, I made no doubt. Addis Wickersham—apologetic in manner because he said that he had only consented to serve one round of cocktails in order that his wife’s dreadful idea would go over—tried to detain us in talk; but Eva sailed past him and into the evolving matriarchy. She confided to me that she felt like a galleon, with treasure in her hold, because her frock was the prettiest in the room. To impress upon men her standing as an artist she would rely on the quality of her work, supplemented by her beauty; women could only be overwhelmed by clothes. She saw that these women were divided between amusement and irritation at the drama of her glorious entrance; but above the tumult in her mind the galleon which was Eva’s high heart sailed with this brave show of security on the land behind.

But that she was in the grip of tumult I soon gathered by what she dragged me off into a corner to confide. “What happened at home before you left?” I pressed her. “How can you expect me to understand, properly to sympathize, or even to advise—as I do really make out that you wish me to do—if I’m not posted?”

This I was never to know. She revolved in her mind—and in words to me—what she would say to Nicholas, how she could manage the problem of Nicholas, what part, in short, Nicholas could be permitted to play in her life; but if any act of his, any speech of his, had brought about a crisis she did not tell me. Upon her imagination there lay a suffocating weight. Freedom—freedom from the flesh: this was what she told me she must attain. As usual with her, when she began talking about her work she strove to lift herself out of her body. She cried: “You are free, Dinah! You are free!” And this envy of my unvalued freedom mingled with the invisible presence of Nicholas which flooded her body, and threw her into a frenzy of resentment against nature which had trapped her. She felt the flame of her desire to reach the top of her profession lick from her heart all love for Nicholas; and she justified this infidelity of the spirit by what she believed to be true, that never could her mind belong to a man, be obsessed by a man. She began to hate her body because it had been the lure for the attentions of men who would distract her mind.

We found seats comparatively away from the noise, and she sank down for surcease from her pain; and at once it was harder to bear, for she felt as if she were being physically torn to pieces. In her breast there raged, gnawing at her, a demon of frantic desire to be allowed by life to climb with her ambition. And she thought—watching herself suffer, I noticed—of the boy with the fox at his vitals. “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she moaned; but the irregular action of her heart precluded her speaking aloud; I knew, merely, from the motion of her lips what it was she said. I had seen her like this before, although not over Nicholas.

“Come!” I said at last, rising and endeavouring to pull her to her feet. “This is getting you nowhere.”

She did not dare, she said, to leave her corner, for she knew that something of her emotion would show on her face. The span of life was short, the pace rapid, and what was she to do when time flew past and made her breathe in panting gasps of impatience? She felt a wish, she said, to leap from her chair and get to work at once; and she would have annihilated these people, in order to work now—work forever—if the means for murder were within her grasp. People—always people, too close to her, crowding her, cheating her of her chance! It was because she was a woman. A man would not hesitate to kick anyone out of his way. A man was ruthless. But, if a woman should dare to be ruthless, some man was always in her life to hold her down, to turn the key on her—the key of domineering masculine superiority. She began to wish that she believed in a personal Deity: a Deity would be too great to push down a creature he had made—a poor Eva would not be turned from the Paradise of her ambition. But God was a man. There had never been a supreme deity who was a woman. Always the goddess was an underling, a subservient wretch, with a crescent moon on her head while the god wore the sun.

I said: “Stop that! You’re raving.”

She said between tightly closed teeth: “I can’t bear it.”

I asked her what it was that she could not bear.

She said—admonishing herself: “Hold tight, Eva! Keep the reins! You can’t afford to go off the deep end.” She looked at me, rather piteously. “You know, Dinah, that I’ve gone off the deep end so many times?” She knew that her cold intelligence must find the way out; and with her body so shaken, she would have to put off the session with her mind. She cautioned herself—striving to guard the thing in her that was precious: “Hold tight, you awful fool!” Helplessness ran over her like ice-water. What if she lost the command of that intelligence which had always eventually seen her through? She jumped up and started running across the floor to the only man in the room.

Addis Wickersham lingered behind the table on which he continued to mix drinks for his wife’s woman-party. He mixed the drinks automatically, his eyes fixed and glassy, staring at no woman in particular but surprised by all, shuddering at no one incident but revolted by the sum total of womankind in the raw. He murmured, as if to his secret locked-away mind: “What a ghastly sight—a lot of women stuffing onions down their gullets!” Onions disagreed with him. He continued, however, in a spirit of masochism, to stare at the party, and his occasional shudders rippled unperceived over the immaculate surface of his pose. It was with what appeared to be amusement that he called out to his wife: “Winfreda, my spouse, this is intolerable!”

Winnie Conant never cared whether she talked with a man or a woman, for she wished to force either sex to spread before her excited eyes the map of their emotions. Stating openly that only women comprehend other women’s troubles, she also held that only men possessed the gift of sympathy. She went through her party like a plow, forcing issues, disorganizing what groups might have been headed in another direction. For she considered human beings unable, from lassitude, to help themselves. At her husband’s hail, she halted so suddenly that her mouth remained open with the choked-off words that she had had ready for an important woman with an heroic diaphragm—a star from the opera and therefore new material for Winnie’s studies; she emitted an infantile grunt.

The opera star, her own mouth distended to accommodate a slice of Bermuda onion, spoke in her stead. “Onions,” pronounced the star, “are good for the larynx.”

Addis Wickersham’s voice rolled through his splendid library, and reverberated against his lofty ceiling, and fell upon the star. “Your own larynx is a fine one, madame. I saw it distinctly.”

Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor. The sound of these light but steady taps served to keep her shoulders from jerking; she listened, and regulated the rhythm of her jazz-time tapping. It gave her something to do. It was almost dreadful, to see the close attention she gave to her rhythm. She had reached the point where she could no longer sit and wait for the moment when the pressure of her agony would tear her to pieces. She caught Winnie by the arm.

Winnie was immersed in a discussion with several women who, they said, contemplated leaving their husbands. Her mouth open and ready for a release of words, she got the chance to shout: “Why change the shape of the man, when the new spirit is bound to be a duplicate of the old?”

As if she had been brought up short by Winnie’s general question, Eva cried: “How can you invariably speak from your own standpoint? How can you be so sure of what other people should do?”

Winnie went on with it as if she believed what she said. “I don’t think, mind you, that any man is possible as a life companion; but what’s the sense in changing?”

I contrived to get Eva off. “Keep quiet,” I admonished her. “They are joking, and you aren’t.”

She was far from joking. The eyes that she turned on me were haggard. For herself, there was no hope, she said to me. Nicholas had impregnated the little house in Eleventh Street; and for her the essence of the big house in Washington Square had got over all New York. She assured me—and I feared that others overheard—that there was no hope of escape from the exigencies of life.

Even in this room, the effect of the high notes of women’s voices was shocking. We went back to our corner. “What’s the matter?” enquired a woman, pausing in her run past to pry into silence. “What’s the matter with you?” Her sharp eyes bored. “Here you are looking broken down—absolutely broken down!—at the end of every season! Are you sure you can still stand the pace? I certainly think you’re looking—well, fagged.” And she left, up in the air but lively in their inferences, more devastating terms than fagged. “You really should take more care of yourself. You’ll be going off in your looks.” Her inflexion said that already this had come about.

I was pleased to notice that the woman’s spitefulness had roused Eva. She positively hissed: “The viper! Dinah, for God’s sake get off your foot! You can’t imagine how it annoys me, that you always sit on one foot. Someone told me she said I had the childlike vanity of all artists, and had to be praised in order to exist; and now she comes out with that vixenish thing, and the inference is plain, I think, don’t you, Dinah? She means to do all she can to kill my work. Well, she won’t be able to, I can tell you!” Instantly she was filled with a calm security about her work. The recent rebellious surge of false energy gave way to her icy judgment of values, her correct estimate of what she could do. Inspired by the unpleasantness of this encounter, she began telling me that she saw, as on a stage, the immense fatigue of people who, having no repose in their restless hearts, no real happiness in their homes, continued to tread the measure for all of every winter season. And as I laughed at her inconsistency, she cried with delight: “It’s a line of thought for a future novel! Have human beings always trod the measure, do you suppose, Dinah?” And she went over and over the idea so that she might not forget it before getting back to her writing-table. Instantly, she was the author pursuing words in which to clothe her thought; she was a novelist, an observer, a connotator, and had not herself suffered the pangs of which she would write. She began planning: “It must be a modern dance of life, as opposed to the dance of death of that old bridge in Switzerland—you remember, Dinah? You must have seen it, when you were taken to see the sights upon your first trip to Europe?”

I was tired, and out of my weariness I demanded: “Why do we all hang together, do you suppose? Are we afraid to be alone? Tell me, Eva: are you afraid of loneliness because of what you might dig out of the bottom of your heart?” At the moment I might have been wound up, like a watch spring, and bound to go on until I ran down.

She gave me a perfunctory smile. “Cheer up,” she said carelessly; “you’ve no troubles.” After a moment of apprehension, however, she added hastily: “But don’t tell them, anyway. I’m not equal to hearing troubles.” She began tapping her foot on the floor: tap, tap, tap. I felt like shrieking. “Besides, do you know that there was something indecent in what you said? Don’t let a tendency to rawness get the better of you, Dinah. It’s of the crystalline purity of unspoken thoughts that art is made.”

I relapsed into helpless laughter. “Eva, you are perfectly delicious, and unexpected, and so provoking that I often wonder how a man can live with you without blowing his brains out!”

She became brusque. “I’m in no mood for that sort of thing. You should know it without my telling you.” Her attention, in short, could not be diverted from whatever had taken place between herself and Nicholas, with, superimposed, what was now taking place in the room. For that the Onion Party was being directed against her we could no longer doubt.

The opera star, swimming in her path, paused long enough to say: “Why not move around and show yourself, Miss Litchfield?”

Eva looked questioningly at her. I felt a surge of anger at the woman: Eva had the resilient faith of a child who does not look for a blow.

The singer continued, speaking kindly: “There’s Florence Quincy, thinking of herself as a blonde planet and waiting for adulation. Go and catch an orbit around the planet and make her happy.”

I swore that I hated females. The opera star swam on, through the firmament of stars, and collided with the Theatre Guild. I said aloud: “Don’t mind, Eva!”

It occurred to Eva—and devastated her—that she had never faced the question of how much sincerity there might be in these people, her friends. Did they ever give whole-hearted praise to each other? Did they—by her sudden pallor I knew that her heart skipped a beat—did they believe in her? What, behind her back, did they say of her and of her work? Never before had she speculated along this line. But the atmosphere of the large room filled with women who were by now stripped of the rags of convention, and their jibes, had shaken her. For a ghastly moment, she wondered if this party would undermine her faith in herself. Instantly, she answered her own query: “No! No, never that! Without my faith in myself—without the knowledge of what I can do—there would be no Eva Litchfield.”

And at once she found herself in the thick of it, talking in order to avoid being left out. She heard her voice complaining, reciting her grievances. She saw on their faces that they did not care; she realized—she must have—that those outside her line of vision laughed; but she went on, and on. She tried to stop talking: I saw that every now and then she seemed to keep her mouth shut by muscular control alone: and she knew that it had got beyond her mastery, and she feared that she was losing hold of everything in her being; and this still further alarmed her, so that she started running across the room: she must get away—away from herself. “What was that awful speculation of yours, Dinah—something about not daring to look within?”

She reached the table behind which, entrenched, Addis Wickersham still philosophically contemplated his wife’s party. He gave her a forbidding look. “Have you eaten onions?”

She shook her head. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back. Her long throat blended like a pearl with the grey wall. She had come over here to cling to Addis Wickersham, to wring from him the intellectual reinstatement she must have in order to go on existing. He must be forced to say something definite about the one pure devotion of her life, her work. The noise of these many feminine voices, untuned by the bass of men’s voices, deafened her, took the fine edge off her wits; and she found that she was staring at Addis Wickersham, like a lost thing. She said to him, over and over—a child who has learned a set of words: “What do you think of my work, Addis? I want to know the truth of what you think. I’m strong enough to bear the truth.” And all the time, I felt sure that she was experiencing a new wonder about the truth.

Wickersham’s nerves had frayed; and he was held to the scene by a horrible fascination. He was delighted to take it out on someone. “Has it never occurred to you, Eva, that you write not so much for the quality of literature as for the attention it wins for you?” This being unfair, and untrue, he looked ashamed of himself; but he let it stand. After all, Eva was trying.

She recoiled, pressing her hands against the wall for support. A man had never before struck her. She might have been crucified to the wall, her hands out on either side, holding her body upright; she seemed to hang by her hands. I am sure that she heard what went on around her, and that she could take no part because she had been deprived of her reason for ever again speaking. He had smitten something which had held her up; and this eventually she tried to tell him. But smiling women pressed in on her, clawing at her with words—tearing out her eyes with saccharine words—hurting her, defiling her. She heard them say to each other that she wept because she was not the central light of the party. She told me afterwards that she did not know how she heard these words, for already she was running from the house; but under the strain of her suffering she must have turned clairaudient. The party, becoming too terrible for her spirit, transformed all gatherings of her friends into horrors no longer to be borne; she must not see them again. She said this many times, on her way home: she must never again see her friends.

Gathering up her wrap and mine, I said to Addis Wickersham that I must try to overtake her. “She looks very strange. She’s apt to do anything.”

“Nonsense,” he said comfortably. “She’s strange because she gets away with it.”

I did not believe this to be a pose on Eva’s part. I insisted on going after her. I found myself saying, many times, “She can’t help it.” She walked rapidly. I saw her ahead of me, her thin frock blowing back in the night breeze. She had almost reached the little friendly house in Eleventh Street when I overtook her; she had walked more slowly as she approached her home wherein her husband awaited her return. With a final run, I caught her by the arm; and she seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.

She began telling me much of what I have just repeated, and the climax of her rush towards her home. She had said to herself that she must get off from the crowd and think. Her look turned in, and she began to know fear in its decadence. She realized that she must uproot this particular fear, if she was to go on. Time was what she needed—time in which she would hear no unkind word: security in that time. She stopped and leaned against the wall of a house. She tried to tell herself: “It’s their jealousy.” But, her senses more than ever acute, as if she had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked back and read on their faces everything they had not said, and her own intelligence arose to defeat her. She heard herself groaning.

Everyday life pressed in on her: a policeman stopped to look curiously at her. “Anything wrong, lady?”

She straightened. “No. Nothing.” She added: “Thank you, officer.”

Together we went the few remaining yards and she opened the door with her latchkey. I knew that she hoped she would not see Nicholas. But he came down at once. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking closely at her. The policeman had been kinder.

She averted her tear-stained face. Like a frightened child, she held my hand. “Nothing. Nothing you would understand.”

“I never saw you look this way——” he speculated.

She threw herself face down on the day-bed and cried out that she must be saved from her friends.

Nicholas stood looking down on her. If she had glanced up, and so seen his smile, she would have recognized—behind the smile, where she might never again see it—that quality the absence of which in him she had deplored: irony, newly born to console him.

V

New York in summer is the ideal place to work in; when once hot weather has dropped on this spit of land the hardiest offenders stop giving parties. Office workers who traverse the streets because they cannot avoid it hold their hats in their hands and companion women whose skimpy frocks expose blistered shoulders. Asphalt menders take possession, and the pungent smell of hot tar mingles with smells more intimate to the inhabitants. Close over the sweltering city comes down a roof of brass.

The summer of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine found New York preparing to pay the piper, although no premonition of the end of a great orgy had as yet got in the air. I finished my book, and hung over the parapet of my terrace and watched the antics of aviators who always seem care-free and who are known to be above suffering from the heat, and wondered if Eva and Nicholas had arrived at a better understanding. September set in with its usual recrudescence of a frazzled mid-summer, and what plants were still in window-boxes lay down and died gracelessly.

The sound of Eva’s voice over the telephone—high, sweet, and, I noticed, in some way that I did not fathom very happy—was one of the most irritating things that could have happened. She announced their return at an unexpectedly early date and demanded my immediate appearance at her house. There was nothing I wanted less to do. My curiosity was like the plants in the window-boxes, dead or dying and not caring to pick up. I wanted to go somewhere and tell my own troubles. This bright and terrible day was not the curse which would have been hurled by high heaven at a dancer, let us say, or a singer. Only to a novelist, cooped up all day and every day, would the sun have seemed so personally vengeful.

“Well,” I said to Eva, “I’m glad you are back, and all that: consider it said: but what in the name of peace have you to tell that could not have waited for a more merciful day?”

No matter what the weather, she remained cool and good to look at. Nothing could have persuaded her to leave the house in the daytime. She received me with bubbling mirth; she was, it shortly appeared, vastly amused over her husband’s having fled the house. “He’s about done in by the stage during which I corrected the manuscript; he said my jabbering sentences over and over sounded like radios in the distance. He said ‘What is the matter with it? That thing stands up. I can understand it.’ Poor darling! And I said—” she looked askance at me—“I said ‘Suppose I got at you with a comment on your working so hard over a God-awful building that will stand up anyway?’ He thought that this meant I was at last grasping his line of work, and he said ‘Angel girl!’ and was happy. He really doesn’t, you know, take in what I mean when I say ‘I’ll die—die!—if it leaves my hands before it’s as perfect as I can make it!’ Isn’t it odd, Dinah, that a man thinks kisses—love-making—can heal the laceration of the heart over the eternal fact that a book is never up to its conception?” Her lifted eyes were breath-taking. Gazing into them, Nicholas had probably not heard a word she said. And she might at this moment have been making love to him, the tone of her voice was so thrilling.

But underneath her lightness, her gaiety—and no one could be more lightly gay than Eva in certain moods—I felt that there was something else. I waited.

“Did you know,” she questioned me, “that Nick is playing the stock market? Oh, not plunging; he says he went in ‘not enough to ruin us if I lose, but enough to make us if I win.’ Tony Bloodgood is managing it for him. Nick says his mother is disgustedly shocked, believing as she does that the only sound value is land. But as for me, when he told me I rushed at him and kissed him. And would you believe it, Dinah, although he is the one who is speculating, he was profoundly disgusted by my delight! He accused me again of loving money. Oh—we aren’t beyond quarrelling over everything that comes up, in spite of——”

“In spite of what?”

She threw her head back and laughed. I saw her long throat rippling with mirth. “We shall come to that later. I want to tell you how inconsistent Nick was about what he calls my love of money. Dinah, he has never been poor; he doesn’t know what it is to want to be certain that one will never again be poor. I knew what was the matter with him, although he didn’t know what was the matter with me. He had to have an interval in which to again enclose against me all of his mother’s scorn, all of his mother’s resentment, of the blatant wealth of the present New York. Oh, yes: I’ve been studying Nick, as I would study a character for a novel: there is every reason, now, why I should understand all his quirks and fancies. Not for the first time, he was wondering why I alone have the power to rouse him to this admiration of his mother’s tenets. And I saw his wonder, and his own—in spite of himself—resentment of me.”

She looked worn and tired, and at the same time she looked deeply satisfied. Was it because she had finished her book? Was it because she had decided to understand her husband? She went on to say: “He can’t see how, when a book is at last finished, one is played out, fagged, and terribly glad.”

I glanced suspiciously at her. “You are glad of something else,” I accused her. “What is it?”

She burst out laughing; and I noticed, now, a different quality in her laughter; it lilted. “Well, then—if you will have it—I am going to have a child!”

I sat staring, dumbly.

“It was the last thing I expected,” she told me.

There was no quiet in New York. I heard the noise of outdoors coming in on us—the windows open to it, and my nerves beginning to shriek on account of it. I thought that if there should be no noise, inside and outside of houses, I could more quickly take in what she had said: but the main thing, I felt, was what she in a moment would say. The Elevated roared and clanked, half a block away on Sixth Avenue. I cried: “How can anyone think, in New York? If it were just quieter, I could tell you what I feel about it, Eva.” I reflected. “And I could also try to get at how you feel about it.”

“I am glad,” she said positively. “I should think you could tell.”

“That’s what I was saying,” I returned. “There’s a numbness that drops on me, when the windows are open and noise pours in over me; and then I can neither think nor feel. But I do know that I am glad. I think it is the best thing for you.”

She threw up her hands. She laughed, then, at herself and, I knew, at me. “You did say that as if you were an ancestor!”

I realized that always at the back of my mind had been the speculation of how Eva would take the contingency which had at last arisen. I suppose I had felt that she was not the kind of woman who stands up under buffets; and in spite of her brave laughter I felt sorry for her. Her head drooped, at the moment, as if it had been beaten down by storms. She was looking out at the trees in the back garden. These wretched backyard trees of New York are called the Tree of Heaven—because they grow on nothing but hope, possibly. The leaves had started falling, and the almost bare branches were drawn in ink strokes against the darkening sky in which the first timid stars were coming out. Eva’s small head, bent and graceful, was sublimated and became part of the loveliness of twilight. There was about her still figure a suspension of all emotion. Life had stopped for a time while she looked within. I wondered what she saw; and asked what was the matter, and winced in anticipation of what she might say. I wondered if Nicholas, when she had told him, had felt as if he did not dare move, that any slight motion might precipitate the crash of his ideal.

What she said was: “I’ve always wanted a child.”

I saw that for the time she believed it. She was dramatizing herself. Her voice broke into a sort of rippling joy, like the note of a bird, deep in the throat but liquid. “I’m so glad! So glad! I have such a wonderful feeling of joy, of happiness, of—contentment: as if I had found out something.”

“Did you say this to Nicholas?” I asked impertinently.

“Certainly,” she assured me, her eyes opening wider. “How would you have had me do it? I was bound to tell him how enchanting it was for me to have a child. He took a long breath, as if it went through his body and buoyed him up to the skies. He was quite perfect about it. He couldn’t speak. He was afraid to touch me, as if I were a phantom of some delight that had always faded from his grasp. I suspect he’d had an ideal of me, all along, that would have satisfied me if I’d been nice enough to find it out. This great breath that he drew—exalting him to God, Dinah!—was so nearly a deep sigh that it startled me. There’s a lot to Nick. But I wanted him to say it; I wanted to see what words he would use.”

I said: “He might have felt—you describe him as being very moved—well, then, he might have felt that words can do nothing, when a man’s soul is touched.”

She smiled with pleasure. “Yes, I think that was the way he felt about it. And besides, the poor darling was never good at saying things. He has no command over words.”

I began to giggle. “There’s the sound of conjugal home life!” And we sat quiet as mice, listening to the scratch of Nicholas’s latchkey in the front door. He came up the stairs on tiptoe, the ridiculous creature. He entered Eva’s study as if looking in on an invalid. “Sweetheart!” he said lucidly. If ever I saw a man whose heart might burst with its load of pure happiness it was Nicholas Van Suydam. Words—in a case like this?

When he did resort to words, he employed the wrong ones. “I hope my little woman is taking good care of herself?” he admonished her tenderly. I fled.

I observed that the Van Suydams now embarked upon a course of coddling Eva. Strolling down to the Brevoort for luncheon, I noticed that the maroon brougham waited at the door of the little house in Eleventh Street. Upon a fine afternoon, I was amused at the sight of Eva in the brougham, seated beside her mother-in-law. She looked demure. I fancied that she actually enjoyed the pomp of the brougham with Higginson on the box-seat.

She telephoned to ask if I were going to Charles Glidden’s party for a most exalted English woman novelist. “Who—” she almost gurgled—“do you think is going with us? Nick’s mother!”

I settled myself comfortably at my end of the line. “Go on; tell me the rest?”

“Dinah, that old woman is worthy of praise. She is making a determined effort to see things from my point of view. The now unbroken chain of the Van Suydam family! She hasn’t the slightest desire to see the party, but she considers this the proper time for the family to go out together.”

Eva knew how to make the effective entrance; she would be late. But I would not have missed it, as none of us would: we all arrived early, and made excuses for hovering near the door. Florence Quincy whispered to me that she wondered if Eva had been told by some little bird that the exalted one would also be late, thereby stealing her thunder. “Of course you know——?” said Florence. “Ah well, she is at last a Van Suydam!”

Molly Underhill said violently: “She is welcome to it!” Molly stuck to me like a burr. Her face was pinched and terrible. “Look here,” she burst out, “I’ve got to talk. Talk about myself. Or I’ll blow up. Do you ever wonder about yourself? Do you ever wonder what it is that holds you back?”

“From what?” I demanded impatiently.

Desperation flashed out on her face, and ran through her tense, thin body like a poison. “It’s this way. And if you ever repeat it I’ll say you’re lying. I am a ‘good woman’.”

I looked at her. There was no obvious retort.

She said: “I overheard someone saying it about me, as I came over to speak to you: and it’s true! It’s true!”

I bounced off the foot on which I had sat doubled comfortably. “What of it?”

She said: “I didn’t want it to get out on me. Oh, hell—where’s a drink?”

James Pomeroy hastened to get the drink, and watched her with interest as she tossed it down. “And——?” he encouraged.

Molly smiled languishingly up at him. “How long have you been leaning over the back of the sofa?”

“Not long enough to hear much,” he reassured her. “Do finish it? You were going to say——?”

“I was telling Dinah a lot of fibs because she is simple enough to believe me.” She rose and sauntered off, swaying her hips.

Pomeroy said to me: “She’s a frustrated victim of her early environment. She’s afraid she will die in the state of grace that her mother would wish for her. She will be mortified when she faces God.”

I bewailed myself: “We’re vultures, aren’t we? We pick bones. I’m sick of it—sometimes.”

“Dinah—darling!” said Pomeroy. “Don’t allow yourself to become a virago.”

All around us, talk was served in tantalizing tidbits. Robed like a vampire from some unconscious wish, Florence Quincy stood, with wispy grey draperies flattened against the wall, moodily observing because she lacked the desire that at this moment would have thrown her into something. Her face in repose was never cheerful. We had always fallen short in guessing what she was after. Pomeroy said to me: “It’s simple to guess what Molly Underhill is after: she’s after a load of sin.” He continued buzzing in my ear.

But in my ear others buzzed. “I myself shall try Africa next,” said Justo Zermonte. “The only thing one cannot find in New York is a Negro at home.”

Someone busily took down notes: I heard the scratching of a pencil. “You don’t object if I use that in my column, do you? No one else has thought to say it.”

Molly Underhill huddled in a distant corner with one of her youthful admirers. She made me uneasy. But Pomeroy said: “She can’t harm them, and they can’t harm her.”

A young Jew flung himself at the piano and played the “Rhapsody in Blue”; his face, fiercely intent, wretched, worn, was removed, by his music, from the people in the room. His fingers drew, through the piano, all that was pent up in us. Thwarted passions, disillusioned passions, passions that had leapt the fence: what did it matter, when the result was suffering? I was softened in my judgments by the “Rhapsody in Blue.” I enquired of Pomeroy if conventions had come out of God’s way, or if God were Himself the product of conventions.

“Dearest!” said Pomeroy, putting up his eyeglass to look me over. “Don’t be silly.”

I said to myself: “I won’t talk. I won’t speak another word from the real inside.” And at once I said to Florence Quincy: “I’ve been working it out—what we all need; and it looks as if it of course has to turn us into hell cats—if we do it.”

“We are hell cats anyhow,” said Florence. “But what do you mean?”

I thought of Eva. “In order to do creative work one must have—and preserve at all costs, even to acting as a slow poison on those who come in contact with us—the heart of fire and the brain of ice. That’s the working combination.”

We all thought of Eva, today. “It works both ways,” said Florence fairly. “The unfortunates who take us over poison us. Why do they ever want us?” she pursued pensively. “We never lapse into nice comfortable bodies around the home fireside.”

James Pomeroy remarked that every now and then he, on his part, almost bolted in the other direction. “There’s Priscilla Swords: upon my word, I have to hold myself back from bolting in her direction.” He expounded his reasons for never actually bolting to her. He had said to her that he was about to give her up as hopeless; he had said: “I’ve taken you everywhere; I’ve arranged for you to meet the most famous people in New York; and what impression has it made on you? Not a dent!”

Priscilla Swords had given him her wide smile. She had teeth, he said, that were purely white. “But I do appreciate it, Jimmie. I think they are very nice.”

He said that at this there was nothing to do but break into a genuine groan. “Oh, God, Priscilla! That’s the one thing they aren’t!”

We were laughing over this when the Van Suydams walked in; the smile in Eva’s eyes as they met mine was part of my amusement and at the same time apart from it. She paused long enough to whisper to me: “She has put on her diamond earrings!”

The earrings winked merrily as the elderly lady turned her head. They were large single stones pulling down by their weight the lobe of the ear. On her very small hands heavy diamond rings glittered, and on her bosom sparkled an imperious diamond brooch of the extinct sunburst design. Hooked into her black velvet creation with the hereditary lace after-thought, she trod the measure of a lady’s entrance. I heard her say to Charles Glidden, who, somewhat dashed, met her as she advanced: “A small glass of sherry, if you please.” She observed the party with a detached interest worthy of her host. “Times are changing; and I hope I am not narrow-minded,” she observed graciously. The lorgnette came into play. She appeared to be indifferent to the fact that we watched her as she dissected us; she might have been oblivious of it.

Florence nudged me: “Too bad! And on top of that, too. But here is, at last, the great unknown.”

The exalted one swept into the room on Glidden’s arm. She was at once correctly arranged in a strategic position, and we began filing past. Authors buzzed, near to the celebrity and watching her, a gigantic hive of industrious bees. She was encased, as in a cuirass, with the aura of undisputed fame. Armed with her knowledge that nowhere in the world of the English language was she unknown, she beamed, as she could afford to beam, on her court. She was kind, as the great are kind. And Glidden smiled at his prize, and at his party, and enjoyed a three-ring circus in his mind.

Someone said to Florence and me: “She’s a bit old-fashioned in her style, but she can run for a while longer on her prestige, of course. The old war horses can’t be killed off, worse luck.”

And Pomeroy chuckled: “So she got under your skin, with her formula?”

For the exalted one had dropped into a chant as the easiest way out. Her voice trailing after every introduction performed by Glidden, she turned like an automaton to meet outstretched hands. “So glad to meet you. So glad to meet you. Let me see, now—what is it you have written? So stupid of me to forget.”

“It’s a swell show,” said Florence. We found that still we were accompanied by James Pomeroy. “And to think that I started to go to the theatre instead!” gloated Pomeroy. We hung, enthralled, on the exalted one’s lips, which continued to mouth her formula: “So glad to meet you. What is it you have written? So glad to meet you.”

Getting away from her husband and mother-in-law, Eva fled across the room. “I can’t bear another blow! Did you hear her? What does it come to—that I’ve worked, and sold my soul—when that woman asks what I’ve written?”

“Why can’t you laugh at it?” asked Florence.

However, to even Spencer Mapes’ suave interjections she merely shook a despondent head.

“This won’t do,” said the sophist. “You will have to get up your fighting spirit.”

She said nothing to this.

He pursued his theme. “If you are to beat her out, you must keep yourself in the pink of condition—like a prize fighter, if you’ll pardon the comparison. It’s no half-time job—building up a great reputation.”

She said: “True.” Her voice was discouraged.

He pushed it. “For the reason that women let other interests get in their way——” His pause was impressive. But his lips remained pursed for another cunning effort.

She appeared to be lost in thought. Her eyes were now fixed on him. I looked around for reinforcements; but Florence and Pomeroy had sauntered off.

Mapes’ hesitation might have arisen from a noble wish to be fair. Eva’s face was pale; her lips parted as if to speak, but she contented herself with another shake of her head. He said: “You mustn’t think for an instant that I’ve anything but your ultimate good at heart. I feel—to return to our unworthy comparison—that, in a way, I am your trainer.”

She said: “I know. It’s very good of you.”

He put a commiserating hand on hers. “Don’t be coddled the wrong way—the injudicious way. Remember you’ve your great gift to guard, and for the sake of that gift everything you may want to do yourself—as a woman—must go into the discard.”

A strange exaltation took possession of her. Her cheeks once more bright with the clear pink so characteristic of her beauty, she cried: “Oh, thank you, thank you, Spence! You don’t know what a friend you’ve shown yourself to be—today—at exactly this time!”

He stood looking after her as she went away; and I stood looking fixedly at him. He said to me, surprisingly: “It’s desecration!”

“Ah you frighten me!” I almost wailed. “You frighten me! What are you trying to do to her? You are revolting!”

“My dear Dinah,” he replied smoothly, “you never use the delicate rapier; do you? Your weapon is the battle-ax.”

I said: “What a friend you are!” I pushed through the crowd in pursuit of Eva. But she, on her part, searched for Nicholas. I caught her as she said to him, excitedly, that her brain was on fire, that it burned the inside of her head. She cried to him: “Do you realize that no one considers me? Have you ever stopped to think that everyone conspires to use up my strength?” Had he noticed, she enquired as if it were his fault, that idiot Molly Underhill holding on to her while she told her troubles? “People—” she almost raved—“should keep their troubles to themselves.”

Nicholas was mild about it. “Early to bed, for you. You are working yourself up.”

With her sudden compunction, she touched his arm. “Poor Nick! It was a sad day for you, when you married me, wasn’t it?” For a time she stood quietly, regarding him with kindliness. Then she shrugged. “But you would do it, you know. All right! That’s that. Find your mother, and we will go home.”

It was the next day when I heard from Eva the sequel to the evening.

Mrs. Van Suydam had sat erect in the taxi, resisting her natural fatigue. “We shall have a lovely Christmas, children,” she had remarked affably. “And I hope it may be a bracing, biting spell of weather, such as we had—I recall it vividly—the winter Nicholas was born.”

Eva’s interruption had been abrupt. “It will be a Christmas of work, for me.”

It appears that the elderly lady had protested. Eva had explained with scant courtesy that she must start in at once on her next book, whereupon her mother-in-law had called such a course, “in her condition,” suicidal. “Think of your unborn child,” Mrs. Van Suydam had persisted, driving Eva—so she told me—frantic with her insistence on the necessary sublimation of Eva Litchfield to the child. “Don’t push yourself,” said Mrs. Van Suydam in a voice of stern admonition.

Eva said that she herself spoke through set teeth; she was by now in an agony of determination. “I’ll beat that dreadful woman if it takes me years! And that is exactly what I’ve got to do—push myself,” she had finished in a cry on this her instant response to her own doubts.

The little house was cozy, and Eva’s study heavy with the scent of the roses that Nicholas kept on her writing-table. They stood looking at each other. Nicholas smiled, she remembered, but she knew that her own face was grave. He was still thinking, she assured me, of the emotion of the day when she had told him that she was going to have a child. Her hand, however, was at once raised against him. “Wait!” Held suspended in his recapture of the lovely mood, he did in fact wait. He was helpless, as are all men, in face of this mystery of the creation of another human being.

With the exception of the springing flame in her gaze, she did not move. She was arrested in any ordinary motion by the violence of her purpose. “I am not going to have that baby!”

She reported to me: “I saw straight into his mind. It’s easy to see into a man’s mind when you’ve been married to him.” He was conscious of his face. He had felt the muscles drawing tightly—drawn back to his ears, drawn around his nose—drawing his mouth into a new and strange mouth. In his mind that Eva so easily read there was a crash, as if a house that he had built had fallen.

She again spoke to him. “You might as well understand, first as last, that I have no intention of going through with it.” She said she began walking up and down the room. “I have my work to do. I have my career to consider. Let other women have children.”

And again she was very sure that she saw into his head, and she was not moved by what she saw. He looked at her with impersonal wonder; for this much he had discovered—that she was ugly. But he realized that he must say something. Eva reminded me that she had told me, upon another occasion when she had reported one of their scenes, that when he was exalted he was not under a compulsion to speak. He said, at any rate: “You would do this—you?”

She said to me: “If you keep your head, and watch—and you are a novelist—life is dramatic: isn’t it?” What she said to him was: “You are being melodramatic.”

PART FOUR

I

There was about the whole thing a sense of swift disaster. Ruin of all things, temporal and spiritual, seemed close on our heels. And yet, nothing had actually happened to us. But the air was charged with vengeance. One found oneself believing implicitly in the Old Testament, and in a God who was mighty in wrath. In words, on white paper, I am failing to convey the full weight of this threat as we received it at the time. Things are never so bad, once they are translated into words; for words fail of true imputation. If I had seen on the sky, as upon my return to New York I had almost expected to see, a finger tracing a curse, I would not have been shakier than I was when, in the chilly afternoon sunshine, I came from the little house in Eleventh Street with Eva. This disappointing sunshine glinted across the stoop and neglected the north windows and warmed nothing.

We were going out for a walk. Eva’s face, above her furs, flower-like in its delicacy of feature and colouring, was so much more heartening than the things of which I had been thinking that I smiled at her. “You are nice, Eva,” I said; “you’re nice!”

She turned upon me eyes that failed to see beyond her own concerns. “When you come down here and bother me with doleful prognostications about things that don’t affect you and me, Dinah, you get me out of sorts. Don’t be ‘sensible’, will you? You’ll spoil your work if you develop executive ability. Nick’s that way.” She gave me her little impish grin; her half-smile with its implications was for other moods. “Spencer Mapes says that Nick has sense while I have sensibility.”

Blaming her for her failure to throw herself into my mood, I now failed to follow her lead to lightness. “I knew, all along, that the outrageous summer before last was an omen. Eva, the brassy sky was a warning!”

She displayed sincere astonishment. “Of what?”

I had, in reply to this, only the small rejoinder: “The stock market crash.”

She remarked, practically, that as neither of us had had money in it we need not think about it. “If you had the things to worry you that I have,” she went on, “then I would sympathize, my dear. But as it is—I have Nick’s work to worry me, if you want to know.” She complained that he had got little work of late, and she put it down to what she said she had all along suspected: the quality of his work had fallen off. “It’s not surprising,” she stated. “Look around you at these abortions of his trade.” She waved disdainfully at the modernity of lower Fifth Avenue. “How can anyone call these horrid things the result of talent?” She was, I had noticed, unimpressed by modern architecture; while it appalled me, it left her unshaken. She said, now, that she felt a desire to go to her mother-in-law’s house in Washington Square and rest her eyes. “I love it, there. One knows, when in that rarefied atmosphere of dried rose leaves, that nothing happens which can shake the world, Dinah. It might do you good to go. You let your nerves play you tricks.”

And yet at this time New York was a city struggling with alarms. Even the staccato of steel construction was, or seemed to be, muted. It was a mild winter, enervating the optimism of those accustomed to bitter cold; and, with surprising ease, the citizens had dropped into one of the most pronounced cases of mass pessimism seen by a world that has seen a great many things. It would not have surprised the New Yorkers if their amazing new buildings had tumbled down. Under the influence of adversity, they had even begun to speculate on how much weight the rock of Manhattan could hold up without splitting, a contingency over which no thought had been wasted in the days of their prosperity. “Have you sensibility?” I wondered aloud.

“Not that sort,” she replied promptly and cheerfully. “But I want to tell you that I have looked forward more than you may surmise: what do you think I did with the money the last book brought me? I didn’t spend it; I went back to first principles, and while I didn’t hide it in my stocking I did the modern equivalent: I put it in a bank! Oh, I’m safe! I’m safe!” she crowed. Her cheeks flushed; she looked more nearly herself than for some time past.

We discovered Mrs. Van Suydam to be entertaining her own friends at tea. The Misses Ingoldsby and Mr. Tappen Tillinghast at once ceased what they had been saying to look at us with varying degrees of guilt. With the same expression of stopping in the middle of something detrimental, the dark old portraits on the white walls might have this minute clapped their lips together; the red draperies over the windows might have been drawn in front of a whisper. Formal old chairs stiffened their backs at our entrance, nice old tables forbade us to enjoy their grace. The ginger jars on the high mantel closed in against us their dried rose leaves. I had been in this drawing-room many times, and had always found it to be a gracious room.

“You were talking about me,” Eva asserted gaily. “No matter where I go, I find that people have been talking about me. However, we all talk about each other.” But the look that she now bent upon her mother-in-law was serious, and revealed in its small way that she was, then, uneasy. “We don’t object to being discussed; it’s part of the business, really. Only, here in this house, it’s different.”

Miss Augusta Ingoldsby could always be depended on. She said judicially: “My dear girl, whenever we speak of you it is in your best interests, let me assure you.”

Eva took this with her lightness which she wore like a mantle. “Of course! I told you that I didn’t object. I came over, to tell the truth, to discuss myself.”

Miss Augusta moved her chair closer and leaned forward, efficient and reliable. “You can tell us anything.”

Mrs. Van Suydam sat more rigidly erect. “Augusta!”

I heard the aside of the younger Miss Ingoldsby: “Gussie always did talk too much, Tilly, as I am forever telling her.”

Mr. Tillinghast cleared his lean throat.

Miss Augusta rolled a vigorous eye around the circle of her cronies. She settled firmly in her chair, her feet together in the correct dancing attitude of her youth; she could have instantly risen without undue effort, and she could then have charged forward, or retreated, in full command of her body. “I am very fond of young people,” she began her lecture, “and I don’t at all mind giving much of my time to the solution of their problems.” She was so intently marshalling her as yet unspoken sentences, and the others were so keenly waiting for a chance to stop her off, that it was easy to speak in an aside to Eva. I touched her arm. Remembering what she had told me of a previous tea-party in this room, meeting her eye which gleamed with her own memory of that conversation and this present substantiation of it, I argued with her: “I see no reason for staying. Do come away? Why should you subject yourself to unpleasantness?”

Eva said: “Nonsense! Nick’s mother is never unpleasant. We are staying, old girl, and you might as well resign yourself to it.”

I urged my point, however. “Did you ever talk to her—really talk to her?” It seemed to me that the face Mrs. Van Suydam at this moment turned towards Eva was as closed as the room. This elderly and colourless face was not forbidding so much as it was casually but totally withdrawn from recognition of anything between herself and her son’s wife. I recalled her manner towards her daughter-in-law at the Glidden party a year ago. In deciding for herself a matter that she held to be solely her own affair Eva had brought down on her head an avalanche that as yet she did not even instinctively feel. Mrs. Van Suydam enquired: “You wished to speak to me, you say?” Her courtesy was so complete as to be in itself a barrier.

Eva said: “Very much. I knew, as I came in sight of the house, that I must talk to you.” Her smile was a lovely thing. And I noticed again how easily she believed in the devotion of others.

With dexterity compounded of equal parts of will and of a surety that she could do as she pleased with circumstances, Mrs. Van Suydam got rid of her friends. It might have been that Eva’s refusal to carry on the Van Suydam family was the first irretrievable reverse she had ever encountered. I cannot recall with what polite inanities I made my attempt to escape in the large wake of Miss Augusta; I do remember that Eva pushed me into the embrasure of a window and said that she would not keep me waiting long. There was nothing for it; and I had cause to castigate myself because of a suspicion that I was delighted to have had it taken out of my hands. I said to myself: “Face facts! We are, none of us, any good. What is friendship, when one writes novels?” I therefore attempted to discipline myself by not listening. I stood behind the long red draperies, looking out at the Square with eyes that saw nothing; and I think they must have forgotten my presence, for all at once I realized that Eva was nervously shedding tears. “Tell me how to bear life?” she implored the older woman, and wept more convulsively when Mrs. Van Suydam did not at once reply.

Mrs. Van Suydam’s eventual “The only way to bear life is to do your duty” was dry as dust.

I put my fingers in my ears. But this makes the ears ring; it is uncomfortable. When I again listened, Eva was saying that she loved Nicholas.

Her mother-in-law qualified this assertion. “Not so much as you love yourself.”

From her voice I almost witnessed Eva’s defiant stare. “You mean that it would be my duty to love him more than I love myself? It’s possibly a splendid thing to love from a sense of duty; but is it a compliment?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s “The sense of duty to the man one loves comes out of the fact of the love—if it’s love” was flat with her final decision on the matter.

This started Eva off on her sometimes wild laughter. “The old fallacies! How can you say a thing like that?” Capitulating as swiftly as she had flouted, she turned back to “How do you know I don’t love him more than I do myself?” I felt reasonably sure that this was a question which she asked herself also. But at this moment she exclaimed: “Let us be frank with each other? I am not afraid of words.” Without peeping around the curtains, I knew that her head was held proudly, as she more than ever defied criticism for which she had asked.

Not until she again raised her voice did I overhear. “I had the right of decision.”

Mrs. Van Suydam judged that “In the eyes of God, you had nothing of the kind.”

But Eva stated that she had not been speaking of God. “It’s a thing that everyone does,” she extenuated.

Mrs. Van Suydam said: “Listen to me very carefully, if you please—you said, I believe, that you are not afraid of words? It comes down to what a man is, and what a woman is. The child is the ultimate answer. As you have settled this question to suit your convenience, my son——”

Eva cried in a sudden high excitement: “So you—and Nick—are trying with all your might to push me down to a question of that sort? I see what——”

Mrs. Van Suydam continued as if she had not been interrupted. “From now on, you will find that my son feels for you the variety of love that a man thinks he feels for his mistress.” The wealth of disdain which she contrived to inject into this sentence was in its way a masterpiece.

“I see what the question is: it’s whether I shall be harnessed! It’s whether I will submit to being harnessed! It’s whether I will meekly agree to demand no more chances than women had in the Middle Ages. I—to be no better than they!” The push of her clipped words made it a sheer impossibility to interrupt; I fancied that the elderly lady must be sitting aghast. “What do you think my friends would say, if you did this to me? What do you think would be the eventual verdict of the world, if Eva Litchfield were fetching and carrying and bearing children for the Van Suydams?” She laughed shortly.

Mrs. Van Suydam then laughed also, shortly, almost viciously, with hatred. “It’s the choice that has always existed, you young fool: the choice between the women men marry and the women they make their mistresses.”

I was enthralled by this contrast between the exaggerations of the generations at war; and it occurred to me—and so amused me that I caught myself just before I chuckled—that Eva’s child, if she had had it, would have been hard put to it to discover a real right course which should also be diametrically opposed to his mother and at the same time his grandmother. The poor generations, on their hunt for novelty!

I heard Eva’s rapid, light footsteps. In her stride up and down the room—up and down, caged—she was almost running, with frenzy. She flung at the elderly lady: “By your creed, the woman with brains is to give up, if she’s so unfortunate as to fall in love?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s words fell like drops of ice-water. “Those brains are designed to feed the brain of the unborn child.”

“My God!” Eva whispered. And then again she gasped the two words. I could not tell whether she laughed, or whether what she considered the enormity of this had literally taken her breath away. Mrs. Van Suydam sat in an assured silence. In order not to break this silence by my own convulsive merriment, I turned and pressed my face to the window pane. I looked down on teaming life. The inevitable hurdy-gurdy of all home crises in New York ground out, gaily and inconsequentially, an Italian love song. The call of the bird to its mate, the man to his sweetheart: the duet to the child—the little bird. It was the Trinity that, behind me in the drawing-room, Mrs. Van Suydam tried to force on Eva. And I wondered, not for the first time, if these poor creatures who infested the Square, involved in a struggle to make both ends meet, knew profounder things than Eva.

But Eva’s immense distaste was in her voice when she said: “I am tired of being told.” She paused. “What chance would gifted women have, if the world ran as you want it to run?”

Mrs. Van Suydam stated calmly: “It does run that way.”

“I think,” Eva began again, “that when a woman has a gift——”

“All women,” pronounced Mrs. Van Suydam, “have the gift of which I speak.”

Eva demanded triumphantly: “You quote the Bible, and God’s will: how do you get around what Christ said about the talents?”

Mrs. Van Suydam said blandly: “Christ spoke of men.”

As Eva went into a scream of laughter, I made the best of awkwardness by issuing from my lair behind the curtains. Eva’s eyes were filled with tears of mirth. She laughed until the tears dried and her eyes were left still sparkling but rueful. “I’m sorry.” She waited, uncertain what to do next. “You will never forgive me for laughing.”

I felt miserably apologetic for my presence. Mrs. Van Suydam gazed into the fire, her eyebrows slightly raised. Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor, her eyes fixed on this cool face turned towards the fire. And then she glanced swiftly at me, said “There’s—literally—nothing to be done!”, shrugged, and asked if she might use the telephone.

I began a lame explanation. “I’m very sorry that I was, in a way, forced to overhear what you said. But Eva must have forgotten that she asked me to wait over by the window.”

She said politely: “I did not forget that you were there, Mrs. Avery. I had, however, no objection to your hearing what I said to my son’s wife. She badly needs discipline.” She left it in doubt whether she considered that the fact of a third person hearing what she had said to Eva would act as a disciplinary measure. It was with difficulty that I pinned her down to my contention that I had been an innocent victim of what was none of my concern. She was then very gracious. “I pray you won’t disturb yourself over it, Mrs. Avery; for I once more assure you that I hadn’t the slightest objection to anyone hearing what I had to say.”

There was no use in further apologies. I felt like making a face at her when she turned her head to stare in surprise at the re-entrance of the elder Miss Ingoldsby. It was evident from Miss Augusta’s immediate bright inspection of the room that she had been drawn back by her curiosity. She murmured something indefinite about having forgotten to give Mrs. Van Suydam a piece of news, looked over her shoulder and by the power of her eye drew her niece, Gertrude Cuyler, across the threshold, and then asked: “What is Eva doing?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s failure to reply might have been a rebuke to her friend for prying, and it might have been that she at once drew Gertrude’s face down and kissed her. At this moment Eva returned from telephoning. Halfway around in her chair, and with one stout ankle and gay shoe exposed by her effort to balance and yet lose nothing, Miss Augusta hailed her: “Well, there you are! I was afraid you had gone home.”

Her eyes fixed on Gertrude Cuyler, Eva advanced, her head up; on the surface of her beauty arrogance shone like armour. She said “How do you do?” to Gertrude, said the same to Miss Ingoldsby, and turned sweetly to her mother-in-law. “You will permit me to intrude a little longer? A gentleman is calling for me.” During the silence which upon her pronouncement fell heavily she smiled. She dominated the room, fading Gertrude’s more florid good looks and nearly succeeding in beating into words the inaudible opposition of Mrs. Van Suydam. The maid, going along the hall to answer the summons of the doorbell, walked too deliberately for my nerves. In the hush of the drawing-room, we heard the colloquy. To the query of a man’s voice the maid dropped into a mumble.

“Miss Eva Litchfield,” the man’s voice expounded. “I’m sure she’s here. Suppose you go and find out?”

The maid said more confidently: “There ain’t anybody by that name lives here.”

We in the drawing-room heard the sound of a man’s soft laughter. “I forgot: I’m asking for Mrs. Nicholas Van Suydam.”

Framed by the white woodwork of the door, Spencer Mapes was chastely Continental in his graceful pause. He might have been calling primarily on Mrs. Van Suydam as he bent over her hand; he might have adored Gertrude Cuyler as he let his eyes dwell on her in greeting; his ardour all but embraced the elder Miss Ingoldsby; and then he said, his voice caressing the words: “Oh, Eva!” He smiled charmingly. “I was having a lonely tea at the Brevoort, and it occurred to me—for no reason in the world except that of inspiration—to drop in here on the chance of finding Eva.” In his elaborate carelessness he contrived to be awkward; and instantly Eva’s act of telephoning him took on significance. He averted his eyes from her and fixed them on Mrs. Van Suydam as he continued with an explanation that had not been sought. He said that he was writing a critical article on Eva’s work, and had come to the pass where he was obliged to consult her on what she wished said. With all his acumen he threw upon Eva the burden of association.

Gertrude Cuyler sat with a troubled face. Motionless, Mrs. Van Suydam waited for something: there was something in the wind. Spencer Mapes shed his warmth in my direction; I knew that he was meaning me to understand that he was saying “Our own dear Dinah!” I went across the room and began the process of taking my leave of my involuntary hostess.

But one could always count on the elder Miss Ingoldsby; Miss Augusta at once rushed into speech. “My dear Mrs. Avery, don’t go yet? I came back in order to tell Lavinia a piece of news—not that I fear it will affect her, for she is sound as the rock of Gibraltar. But, after all—— I daresay you don’t, being an artist, keep up with the daily news? Artists always have their heads in the clouds, don’t they say? I have heard that expression used in relation to them, at any rate. But aren’t you, my dear Mrs. Avery, worried?”

This being startling, I paused in my determined progress towards the door to ask what she meant.

“I allude,” she said as if she recited, “to the financial news of the day.”

“I don’t,” I told her, “keep up with it.”

With a visible slight annoyance, Mrs. Van Suydam enquired what she had to tell. “For of course you’ll tell it.”

“I heard, today, from well authenticated sources which I’m not at liberty to quote, that several New York banks are on the verge of their Waterloo,” said Miss Augusta with satisfaction in having put it so neatly.

Eva cried “Which banks?” and began to tremble.

Miss Augusta’s gratification at this sensation was evident. “I don’t know, my dear girl. But do find out from Nicholas if it’s true—I certainly was told it on good authority—ahem!—Tony Bloodgood, to be exact, mentioned it to Gertrude—that he has lost money?”

Eva gasped: “Spence, I must go home. I must go home at once.”

I hastened to her. One never knew; and I was uneasy at the expression on the elder Mrs. Van Suydam’s face. Also, the interest of Miss Augusta Ingoldsby was not strictly impersonal. “We’ll go together,” I said firmly.

She clutched my arm. “What shall I do?”

I said, under my breath: “Listen to reason. I told you all of this, today, and you didn’t then lose your head.”

The clutch of her fingers on my arm was painful. I cannot remember how we got out of the house. Back of my other unpleasant memories of the day is that of curious eyes following us to the door; in front of all other painful impressions is that of Spencer Mapes solicitously attending us. I muttered to him: “If you will kindly leave us, I can manage Eva.”

Eva had a devastating trick of swinging like a peculiarly rapid pendulum, so that one was left behind, gaping, as she flew through the crises of her passionate nature. She said, with no preparation for it: “Do you realize that I’ve never had a break? Is it because I’m a woman?”

Mapes said: “I thought you were upset over the panic.”

I said to him, fiercely: “Can’t you let her alone? She’d forgotten it.”

We disputed over her; and she walked between us, erect, absent-minded, steeping herself in her own thoughts, suffering through her own thoughts. And around the corner from Eleventh Street, and straight towards us, came Nicholas Van Suydam. The eager look of expectancy on his face savoured of the earlier days of their marriage. Eva whispered: “I forgot that I left word for him to join us at his mother’s.”

I found time to be irritated that she had not said, frankly, upon our starting out for a walk, that she intended going to Mrs. Van Suydam’s. Why would she try to make me believe it the impulse of the moment?

Nicholas quickened his pace, hurrying to join us. He must have looked forward to a stroll home with her; he must again have felt the need of those intimate touches of life with one’s wife when one is friends with her. And evening was even now dropping over the city, and with it the quiet. Doubtless he had welcomed the cessation of rivetting, the noise of which must of late have jabbered at him “All construction work is about over—your career is over—it may be that everything is over.” And here we came, with Eva between us; and her face was set in a tragic look of pain. He stopped short. “What has happened?” he demanded sharply.

Without hesitation I played the coward. I turned and ran. But first I laid a firm hand on Spencer Mapes’ arm and held on until we were around the next corner.

II

Looking back on that dreadful winter, I seem to have run across Eva only upon occasions of disaster. I must have seen her in quieter moments, but the memory of pleasant things is overlaid with misery.

I knew, when I started for the party given by Daniel Pentreath, that the evening would be a sign-post along the way. It was not cheering, upon my somewhat late arrival, to fall immediately into Florence Quincy’s hands; her laughter was derisive, was mournful, was a brew of all the sorts of laughter within the range of man. “You, too, searching for the unattainable?”

“This is, then, one of your evenings in the grand manner,” I commented with resignation. “I asked you a simple question: what’s doing?”

“And I answered you, perhaps less simply. For none of us know what’s doing.” Her painted mouth set in a smile which was the antithesis of her laughter: when she laughed, her face gave the impression of having broken in order to allow sound to escape. “Doubtless you will get off in a corner—and sit on your silly foot—and moon about your soul; and if you had a soul would you be here? There’s the answer. It’s the answer to everything about us, to every one of us and our questions about everything.”

“And maybe I agree with you.”

I saw the shiver which ran along her fine skin, so that the heavy powder she wore cracked, and rolled into ridges. “There’s something in the air tonight—something bad!” With her vermilion lip-stick, and her dead white thick powder, she was a tragic clown.

Annoyed by the sound of a man’s groans coming from the adjacent bedroom, we moved away, although groans were not uncommon here.

Daniel Pentreath loomed over the studio, his gigantic chair, painted as starkly vermilion as Florence’s lips, a throne lifted above his mob of guests. He wore pyjamas, and his grey curls thrust themselves independently into the air; except for his unusual size, he might have been a bad boy escaped from bed. His great voice roared out from a great mouth like a cavern. Pentreath was indifferent to the fact that he had been born too late by many centuries. His behaviour was simply direct and self-indulgent. Topping his guests by his great height, he dwarfed them by his ruthless ability. “Hey!” he shot at someone, a vocal projectile. As most of his teeth were gone, he spoke in short sentences which he threw against his gums. “You gal! Keep your head still!”

“He’s making a sketch of Eva,” Florence explained. “She kept well in his sight until he did. She brought on herself whatever comes.”

For as he worked Pentreath muttered, and snorted, and called all women kittle cattle. “Heugh! Hard as nails—mean as the devil—vain as peacocks: all women! Ornamental, though—silly creatures! Strut like peacocks. Prancing—proud of their tail feathers. Ain’t natural: ought to leave tail feathers to the males, like the birds.”

Florence and I moved cautiously to a position whence we could see Eva. She sat against the vast canvas of Pentreath’s latest study of mountains: they were menacing mountains of black rock. She was very pale. Occasionally she looked helplessly around the room. “I know all about myself,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t do me. You’re cruel.”

I thought: “Like the gods.” But if I had spoken aloud no one would have heard, for Pentreath’s bellow again shattered the room. “Pretty things—glaciers,” he remarked with a change of imagery; “cool, and quiet—full of clear colour—know where they’re goin’ and get there!”

The groans from the bedroom were more insistent, rising, I made no doubt, in order to beat out Pentreath at his own game of noise. A gorgeous youth came up to Florence, his Greek profile magnificently the only classic in the room. “Florence dear—do you mind?—I’m afraid that this time Barney will truly do something desperate.”

Florence said waspishly: “Do I have to take care of everyone who’s incapable of taking care of themselves?” She pulled aside the curtain shrouding the bedroom door, and out gushed the lamentations of Barney. Over her splendid shoulder, she grimaced for my benefit. “I take it they’ve had one of their quarrels,” she remarked; and went inside. The Greek profile rested picturesquely against the door jamb; its owner said to me that he was afraid the trouble was Barney’s disapproval of one of the boys.

Urged by a spiritual necessity for physical support, I went over to lean against another door jamb; and from the next room I heard Anthony Bloodgood making love to a New York girl whom we knew as one of those who are “sometimes going to write because they must express themselves.” Anthony’s voice was strange to me; it was as if his heart were singing because he was with her, and I recalled having heard that he had been in love with her since her school days. He said: “When we’re married, Janny, we can have these people at our home.” If she replied, I missed it; but Anthony’s sense of the magnanimity of his conduct again caused his voice to ring out boldly. “You don’t know it, Janny, but I’m not a brute. I know all about it, loveliest! I’m not going to scold you. I’ve done it myself, you see.”

“You!” The girl’s laughter was convulsive. “You! Oh—— I can’t bear it!”

Indulgently, he shared her amusement. “Carouse around a bit? You don’t think a chap can reach my age without having racketed around town; do you?”

All men spoke the same words to all girls; all men, in more or less roundabout ways, boasted of their early peccadillos. I was mildly amused. Glancing around for some answering smile—for this was the only comic relief of the evening—I met the eyes of a woman who had that instant taken up a position which enabled her to watch the pair. This woman, an interior decorator, was herself the rarest decoration of any room. She had a white face to which she added emphasis by her lack of the slightest touch of rouge. Her hair was densely black with no highlights and with not a trace of the blue sheen which is the beauty of actually black hair. Her eyes, a burning black without glitter, and exceptionally large, revealed at this moment a wild intensity. She looked like some ancient conception of a goddess who takes away, but never bestows, life. I remembered that her hand was small and like a bird’s claw, and that it was always bone-dry. This woman, then, stood looking intently at the girl Janny, and the girl left Anthony Bloodgood and went to her.

The studio was more peaceful than this, although Florence had been right about the tension in the air—tension flowing after me, catching up with me, as I found a chair in a comparatively hidden nook behind the piano. But in the midst of my burst of pure gratitude for the chair I realized that my host held nicely suspended over the crown of my head a beer bottle, or some such missile. The ludicrous feature of it—if one excepts the character of the weapon—was that he looked thoughtful. “Go on!” I instructed him. “Do it! You haven’t the idea that I care if you bash my head in, have you?”

“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then, frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated, but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief.

Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and where—I want to know—is Nick? Oh, Dinah—you always take up for him; but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me——” She went on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions.

Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air.

On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably. “I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.”

We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here town. You know this town well, ladies?”

The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I feel—— Well, I don’t feel natural.”

As if in answer to her reassurance that no bogy-man was around the next turn of the stairs, there was a crack, a thud, and outcries from the studio. Past us, as we shrank back against the dreadful beasts on the wall, they dragged a youth with a bloody head. “Heugh! Got him!” And Pentreath returned to his seat on the piano bench where he played the interrupted accompaniment to the song of a large woman with a large voice. The woman’s voice easily soared above the febrile scale of comments on the recent violence. She sang a thing that sounded angelic.

The damaged youth, supported on either side by youths who winced when his blood spattered them, was being borne to the bathroom for repairs. He opened his eyes and said he did not see what had made Dan so mad at him. He called out: “Jonathan! Oh, Jonathan! Do please come and hold my hand while they wash my head?”

The boy Barney shuddered. “My goodness! How can you have the nerve to ask such a thing with a face all nasty and gory like that?”

“Jonathan?” the injured youth implored. “Do please come with me while they wash my head? Please, Jonathan?”

“No, I won’t!” said the gorgeous youth with the profile. “I’m glad of it!”

Through the now uneasy movement of his guests from room to room, Pentreath played and listened to the song; his face was fine and rapt.

Eva’s spasmodic clutch was on my arm. “Pentreath isn’t human, is he? But he’s great! Why should any of us mind what he does, or says? That is what it is to be truly great.”

Many drank at the sideboard. Addis Wickersham pushed through the throng to ask Eva if it were true that Nicholas had eloped with Gertrude Cuyler. “And here am I, on my way to console my own wife, which you will admit is a novelty.” He added that it had been reported to him that his wife was in possession of Pentreath’s mammoth bedstead, from the depths of which she declared her intention of ending it all. “A side show to the greater show of the party,” commented Wickersham. “You ladies are always upset, in this house; because Daniel steals the spotlight.” His sonorous voice flowed to the bedstead in the adjoining room. But something was missing from this splendid organ; who could be the centre of things at Pentreath’s but Pentreath himself?

It occurred to us, belatedly, that we missed Molly Underhill from amongst these excitedly moving women. And someone said: “She’s off somewhere trying to get herself ruined.”

I found myself near Nicholas; and both of us had lost Eva. He said: “Do try to find out what’s on Eva’s mind?”

I endeavoured to reply with comfortable assurance: “Oh, it’s merely the times.”

And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going—going; and someone with a pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people, and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding, but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s shoulders.

His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening artist in New York—he who had believed these people to be the great tragic characters of the century—had now looked on the face of death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here tonight—and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place was full of policemen.”

Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to? Ain’t we all mad as coots?”

III

On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted, masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery of money fear.

I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit, into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable, with gusts of wet snow—a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar. He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask if you know what plans Eva is making?”

I scoffed: “That has a familiar ring!”

“Ah but she is making plans! I can see it. And the trouble is that she doesn’t say a word about it. She usually talks about whatever is in her head. I wondered if you mightn’t know?”

Against the insistent question in his eyes I opposed truthfully a blank ignorance; but I had at once felt the need for caution. He stood in the clinging, dirty snowflakes, forlorn, looking as if he needed to be whistled home. His dejection wrung from me the delayed information that I had not seen her for some time. I had—although this I did not say—stayed away from her.

He pointedly requested that I come down to see her. “You know how she is—excitable? She’s got herself tremendously worked-up over the panic; and she was already moping over Molly Underhill.”

I could not resist telling him that Eva had telephoned me, some time since, of having gone to his mother for comfort on the score of her responsibility for Molly’s death. She had said to Mrs. Van Suydam that upon a certain occasion she had been so cruel to Molly about her recitation that she felt this had had a large share in breaking down her desire to live. Mrs. Van Suydam, it appeared, had remarked that the opinion of one person was never so powerful as that would come to. I did not tell him that this had only too evidently clipped Eva’s spirits; but he turned on me an eye so comprehending that I became lost in a confused speculation on how deeply he might actually understand Eva. And, as I submitted to his instantly popping me in a taxi, getting in himself and giving the driver the number of the little house in Eleventh Street, I wondered feebly if my supineness arose from the snow slipping down my own back or from a guilty knowledge of my unwillingness to go at all. I felt like saying: “I have my own troubles.” No one took their troubles to Eva.

The taxi skidded, and he re-adjusted the angle of his hat. Why—I asked myself pettishly—are men fussy about their hats which look the same on any slant? His relieved face, as he contemplated me, a virtual prisoner on my way to taking over a share of his burden, produced in me a contrition in the toils of which he, and Eva, I made no doubt, would use me.

“How is work?” I asked casually.

“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures which are luxuries, such as—he paused to grin amiably at me—books. Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle. “However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s worried because she—well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We—my mother and I—have a policy, as my father had—he learned it from his father, and so on back—to hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could explain this to her?”

I objected that this was clearly in his own province.

He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently, but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.”

“She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.”

“Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she came to New York. Oh, I mean—naturally, I know the general outline. But I mean to say—you people charge on New York, and show your most sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of the wave.”

“That’s New York,” I said composedly.

“And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed around the hat, so to speak,” he went on.

I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now, that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”

But he was not frightened by New York. He knew that this city, of which he was an integral part because he had been born of the stock that had settled it—this city whose bold new growth had been conceived in the brains of a body of men like himself—was a cruel city and would cast him out if he lagged; but he was sure that he would not lag and that he and the city understood each other. He gave a positively affectionate glance from the window and said, under his breath, “The poor old town! The poor bastard!” I knew that he thought us the monsters who did not understand. And yet, Eva had hurt him through the medium of every brick in every great new structure.

Through the smoke of my cigarette, I studied him. By his attitude towards what Eva had done he was lying. With him, I fancied, nervousness took the form of an inability to do any creative work at all. But in what he next said he went back to our interchange of remarks on the storming of the fortress by the authors. “You people who come into New York are so marvellous! Such energy! Such apparent ignorance that you could possibly fail to conquer! It’s amazing. I’ve noticed about Eva that she can and does turn on to her work the full force of her storming rages—I don’t mean that in the least the way it sounds, however; but she does tear around the house and bemoan herself—well, then,” he pushed on, now thoroughly involved and, I saw, desperately taking the way out of telling all, “I remember once when she had asked me to read proof sheets to her, and she was cutting up over quite minor mistakes, I assure you—saying that the printers had tampered with her words, and appealing to me in the most agonized way to know if I hadn’t an ear—and the telephone rang in that awfully annoying way it has, off and on, off and on; and she simply screamed to the maid to tell Winnie Conant that she was out—to tell her she was dead—to tell her anything. And, the point is, she gets ahead with her work in, and as a direct result of, her emotional upsets. Sometimes I’m appalled by her vital energy. But when it comes to turning some of that energy into the minutiæ of living she’s horrified at the interruption. She doesn’t,” he concluded helplessly, “open her mail for weeks at a time.” He appeared to look upon this as one of the most inscrutable things about his wife.

I asked lazily: “Why should she? You’ve just said that you’re constantly surprised at the way in which her nervous force is made to serve the needs of her work. Why try to reform her? She knows what she’s about.”

He stared. “But it isn’t I who is up to reforming! She’s putting her shoulder to the wheel of changing me!”

I said to myself: “We’re getting at it!” I asked aloud: “What can you mean?”

He blurted out that she continually told him of how helpful the wives of authors frequently were; these wives, it appeared from her caustic comparisons, saw to it that during the writing of books they were relieved of all annoyances; and she had always wound up by calling on God to know what she would do if no one helped her. In his resentment at this inference, he had, I gathered from what he did not say, studied her with a new cold detachment. He had reminded her of her tantrums when she fancied him falling off in his work. He had gone on to draw her attention to the point of his being the man of the family: would it be suitable for him to be at her disposal all of the working day? He had said—he assured me that he had been dispassionate—“Do you realize that if this goes on I shall be unfit for work?” He gave me a sidelong glance, and said by way of excuse that our crowd talked to each other of all details of our lives; he could not see that he was disloyal to Eva in telling me this.

With no intention of entering into it, I said sweetly that he should be able to manage his wife as men had always managed their wives, by the power of a greater shout.

“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded. “For I assure you that it’s no laughing matter. It has—got out of my hands.” He hurried on with a rather feeble statement that it was not in any way the fault of Eva, who was a particularly guileless creature; it was the fault of certain persons who put things into her head.

“And now you want me to put something into her head?”

He hastened to deny this. He said, out of a clear sky but with immense vindictiveness, that he should have kicked Spencer Mapes out of the house long ago. “Why did I fail to kick him out? What’s lacking in me that I never act on my impulses?” He laughed, then. “I seldom act on my convictions, to tell the truth. This is because I stop long enough to think it out—I want to be fair, you know. But a man shouldn’t stop long enough to think out a crisis. Once it is thought out, a crisis becomes an emasculated psychological situation. There’s something wrong with the age,” he finished on a weak plea.

I said drily that it might be that he was deliberately trying to get himself out of touch with the age. “You’re sorry that you aren’t sorry that jealous husbands no longer flog gentlemen callers. You feel it to be the correct impulse; and you haven’t been able to stem the stream that’s swept our generation beyond it. You’ve turned the clock back—perversely—and its ticks are muffled in your re-adjusted hearing. I mean—you did, of your own accord, step out of Washington Square. Why do you try, in your mind, to step back?” But his clock ticked steadily, and he was helpless. He wondered, he said, if anyone in our crowd had the chance, or wished for the opportunity, to lead private lives. Chatter hit on every nerve in his body. The topics selected applied to him, to Eva, to the two of them in conjunction—to all life, he decided almost wildly. Life was dreadful because, when one needed all strength, all intelligence, in order to see a way through, one was weakened by the cumulative effect of idle remarks that irritated already raw nerves. I said: “You shouldn’t be the one to feel such things. This is your home town.”

He seemed numbed by statements such as this. It was necessary to explain to Nicholas, always, I said to myself with annoyance. “New York does something to us who come here from outside.”

He exclaimed with real indignation: “Eva married me. And a wife becomes what her husband is. Eva is now a New Yorker.”

I contented myself with settling back in my corner of the taxi and from my huddle remarking that at any rate most of us were bad off. “Our gills have dried, you might say.” I liked this simile more than did he; I noticed that he frowned. We went on our way in silence. The great towers leaned over us, threatening us.

He took it up again. “I fail to see what you’re driving at.”

I drawled: “Maybe I don’t see, myself. It’s the result of the weather. It’s depressing weather.”

Having let us in with his latchkey, he set me the example of tiptoeing up the stairs. He might have spared me this anticipatory alarm, for Eva was not at home. I saw that he was at once agitated. It amused me to observe that through association with us he had developed a theatrical attitude towards situations: he went straight to her writing-table, and on his now pale face there was a look of terror. Had there been a note propped against her typewriter, I was convinced that before opening it he would have thought of shooting himself. There was, of course, no note, and he glanced swiftly at me and smiled. I said, casually: “I had feared, you know, that you had got the idea that you were in love with Eva because you were dazzled by the fact of her being, as she undoubtedly is, a famous person.”

He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.” He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife, and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat. While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of your work——”

Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know anything about architecture?”

Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt but that, with inspiration——”

“Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and never can, understand each other’s aims?”

I said to myself—lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a whisper of desertion.

Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her. “I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family. None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather smother.”

Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders.

Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort.

“I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened——”

Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is to see that she’s not worried.”

“She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried sick. The town is on the run.”

“New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only temporary, of course.”

I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So nothing can open your eyes?”

“You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?”

“She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of, yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking sight in town—your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully.

His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked gently. “No, Dinah: I’m—I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a job: happiness with one’s wife.”

We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him, commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t. We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of glass let into the wall.”

He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.”

I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples, have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst engendered by the hunger-consciousness.

“You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned.

“Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them. The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man.

He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of glass?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva. Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night.

Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say——”

But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.

“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good, they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards our pane of glass to say goodbye—they were punctilious about this ceremony—he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas: I’ve got to have another drink!”

Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she wasn’t giving me peace?”

I found that I had crouched back in my chair—crouching away from what I had loosed in him.

“It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things up—arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously: ‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it—that only a man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had to listen to that God-awful term ‘sensible woman’ applied to her she would—— Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have this row.”

I saw that he had marked that in her bearing which had shaken him. It was shocking for Eve, of all people, to show uncertainty of her powers; but he had seen, as I gleaned, that it was uncertainty which was now shaking the foundations on which her life had been built up. Without her pride and joy in her talent, Eva would be a broken woman. He told me that she had all at once cried, as if she had read his mind: “You can’t take it in that something dreadful is happening inside me? You can’t comprehend that an artist’s imagination is a delicate, brittle, easily injured quality?” He had been thrown, by this, back to his cool detachment; although it was not in a spirit of cool detachment that he reënacted this scene for my benefit. He was immensely stirred by the recollection of it. In his intelligence he understood only too well that this was the pose of the creative worker in all arts save architecture, but with his heart he realized that under her doubts Eva’s beauty had faded. It began to seem to him that the conceit of artists is a defence against their own fainting spirit, which otherwise might cringe before the world’s neglect. But she had at once put it on him; she had explained that she felt as if she were beating her head against something more unyielding than the proverbial stone wall when she tried to argue with him. She said it was the fixity of his smile. “You don’t know how you stare at me!” she had said in what amounted to a shriek.

“This was where I was cruel to her, Dinah—and I know it now. I suppose I knew it then, and wanted to be cruel. You see, I don’t trust the influence of that fellow Mapes. You can never put your finger on Eva’s motives; they’re damned complex for a simple man to follow.”

“She is complex,” I put in. I wondered if he were going to regret having told me this. But he had to tell someone: even men feel the necessity to talk, I reflected derisively. “Her acts are necessarily hard to understand, although I don’t doubt that they are simple, and above board, if you could get at them.”

“Then what does she think—feel—about this Mapes fellow?” he asked urgently, but looking ashamed of himself.

I explained that she respected his judgment of her work.

He resumed: “This brings us to my self-charge of cruelty. I told her that while we were on the subject I wished to state that her friends took out the greater part of their sensibility in talk; and she instantly flew at me, although behind her eyes I saw the suspicion she fought down. She said her friends have a great power of belief, a tremendous generosity; and as to critical taste—well, then, if their judgments weren’t to be accepted, where were we for a criterion? I replied to what I saw behind her eyes; I said she’d better go in search of Mapes, then—that as his praise was so whole-hearted a session with him might make her feel better. As for me, I told her, I never got the feeling of sincerity in anything he said. She positively quailed. She might have been seeing a ghost. She begged me not to say such a thing. But I had stopped thinking solely of her. I insisted that he wasn’t an honest man, that he hadn’t an honest eye, and that anyone could tell by his voice that he was sly. She reminded me that he had nothing to gain. But she was at the moment arguing with her intelligence, I knew, trying to bolster her spirit which might turn to water. I was a cheap fellow to say to her ‘I have still to discover what he stands to gain’.”

He tilted back, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Now that she was not before him, to exasperate him by her swift changes of mood, to bewilder him by her illogical veering with the wind of her fancies and the shifting winds of her friends’ fancies, he fell into a state of belated compassion. At this moment she must have seemed to him, as always she did to me, a bewildered creature who was hag-ridden, who could neither take care of herself nor bend her neck to the care of another.

It was at this moment that the telephone rang. His face turned white. With all the ringing that this particular telephone did, interrupting talks between them with its insistent summons to the outside world, he still, at this moment, feared.

I heard the reedy voice over the wire: “Miss Litchfield in?”

“She’s out,” he responded gruffly.

“Is this Miss Litchfield’s husband?” came the squeal of Eva’s agent’s secretary.

His laughter making his response almost gay, he agreed to this.

“Can you take a message for Miss Litchfield?”

He said that he could be trusted with a message.

“Will you tell Miss Litchfield, please, that it’s all right about the Hollywood contract?”

“I’ll tell her as soon as she comes in.” With great care he replaced the instrument on its stand, and again leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He said quietly: “You heard? That’s what she means to do.”

And again we exchanged a look in which we encompassed—and judged, and pardoned, respectively—all things about Eva. The silence became hard to bear. He got up and began a restless prowling around the room. When he spoke, finally, he seemed not aware of it; he was talking to Eva. “Go to Hollywood by all means. And bear in mind that you go with my consent.” He bit down savagely on his pipe stem, and no answering glow appeared in the bowl. He took it from his mouth, looked at it with interest, and remarked: “It isn’t filled!” He was painstaking in the refilling of the pipe. He said: “Both of us need a period of rest from each other.” He might almost be hearing her voice coming back at him, for he replied: “You said you wanted peace—repose. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”

I ventured something futile. And he looked at me and said “Huh?” But he gave a short laugh. “Dinah, you and I need a drink.” He went downstairs. When he came back with the replenished shaker, he said “We’re getting nowhere.” I knew that again he spoke to Eva.

The rasp of her key in the lock brought him around to face the door.

She stood arrested, looking in at Nicholas. She seemed to have been halted in some violent rush, so that even her heavy fur coat swept back like classic drapery. I knew that she was uncertain: her eyes showed a curious light flicker. And then, as she gazed at her husband, her face became compassionate. She was oblivious of my presence.

He said harshly: “What is this thing that you’re putting over without consulting me?”

She said: “I’m sorry, Nick. But it had to be this way. I must——” She stopped; and by her refusal to say it she left him to infer what he pleased of the thing she had been about to say. The lovely look passed like a mist, dissolved in her return to her absorption in herself. I slipped past her unnoticed, and hurried downstairs where my coat had been left. I closed the front door softly; I had no wish to be recalled.

IV

It was early on the following day when she telephoned to insist on seeing me at once. I demurred, and she asked simply if I were going to fail her. Her emotional crises passed like thunder-storms; they were dangerous, but left in their wake a freshened sweetness. I hoped that it was so now: she seemed calm enough, and neatly refuted my arguments against dropping my work immediately.

I advanced tentatively: “You’ve given up the idea?”

She said curtly: “I’ve decided nothing. Will you, or won’t you, come down here?”

“Soon after luncheon,” I therefore promised. “After all, I’m endeavouring to get along myself, you must remember.”

“All right.” The click of the telephone being replaced on its stand was almost simultaneous with the click of her words.

But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning—as if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to turn on—drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my conscience clear.”

Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what, in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust—” as if discussing a prima donna’s husband—“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your going?”

“What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had to talk over, Edgar?”

Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?” he asked me.

Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We left Edgar smiling like an impresario.

“Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.”

I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.”

I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is outside my schedule.”

She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see Nick’s mother.”

Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.”

She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed. “You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation.

We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side. She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door. She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really and truly like—lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.” As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house. She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today it worried her.

We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!”

I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the last thing I shall do for you?”

The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation; and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.” And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield, and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is, really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know—none better!—that she’s stupid.”

Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.”

I said: “It is so to me, also.”

There was now no politeness lost between us; and I had the less reluctance to intrude upon whatever conversation they purposed having. I took a chair removed from theirs, and resigned myself to a laceration of the sensibilities that I hoped to conceal under glacial composure.

The Van Suydams had the gift of their imposing silence. It seemed a long time before she remarked that it was a pleasant day. She dropped this into the well of silence as if Eva had been a chance acquaintance. It would not have mattered whether Eva found the day pleasant or the reverse, as it would not have altered conditions in the drawing-room if all storms had raged outside.

By contrast to the glazed surface of Mrs. Van Suydam’s fine indifference, Eva’s brusqueness amounted to bravado. “I’m going to Hollywood.”

Mrs. Van Suydam murmured: “Indeed?”

Eva must push against the erection of her mother-in-law’s impersonality; she was not to be helped: this much was certain. She said bluntly that she had arrived at a stalemate in her work.

“I don’t think I understand,” advanced the elder woman. “Naturally, I know little about it.”

Eva’s resentment flared. “You’ve never let me tell you about it.”

“I took it for granted,” rejoined Mrs. Van Suydam, “that you fancied I couldn’t understand.” She paused, and added, her face buttoned up: “I understand much.”

Thus brought to a pause, floundering helplessly in the hugger-mugger brought about by her mother-in-law’s will, Eva sat mute. Until this bulwark of Nicholas’ rights presented a weak joint, there was nothing she could do or say. And weakness of any kind, even, at the moment, the weakness of advancing age, was hard to credit to the list of Mrs. Van Suydam’s possibilities. She sat upright—she never lolled—gazing blandly at her son’s wife; and if there was anything to talk over, any loose ends left between them, it seemed a remote contingency from the standpoint of Mrs. Van Suydam’s own understanding of the situation. Eva, it was clear, felt a singular reluctance to speak. The elder woman had—although one began to wonder if even this ignorance could be accurately attributed to her—a technical ignorance of the craft of writing; but in her choice of words when engaged in an encounter she found no difficulty in making her shades of meaning plain. She put, now, only the faintest accent on her “And what does my son say to this scheme of yours?” By an inflexion she had repudiated, for all those born of the Van Suydam blood, any knowledge whatsoever of Hollywood.

Eva’s restless glance passed from object to object in the room. The stony eyes of the elderly lady remained fixed on her. What, she must have asked herself with natural irritation, would be accomplished by meeting an eye of stone? She said: “He doesn’t say.” She looked as if she might scream: I knew that she would scream, if Mrs. Van Suydam emitted her equivocal “Humph! Indeed!” To obviate this, I imagined, she rushed along with “I wished to—I thought it wise to talk it over with you.” She must have seen that Mrs. Van Suydam was making it impossible to talk over anything; but she must also, and immediately, have realized that she had come here because above all things she wished to break through the crust of this old lady’s resistance, to win from her one word of understanding, one softened glance of sympathy. Her desire was futile; and I saw that, in order to avert tears of weakness, of dashed hopes that only this minute she had possibly clearly acknowledged to herself, she began talking frantically. “You are a woman! You are a woman, too! And you’ve been married! You must have married a man like Nick! You could understand, if you would!”

“And what, pray, am I to understand? I trust that it isn’t a question of a divorce?” But in her eyes, which for a second blazed straight at her daughter-in-law, there was every question between man and woman and her revulsion to the majority of them; and by her swift advancing of her assurance that no such thing could be in the wind she proved its presence in her mind.

Eva’s repudiation of this contingency, while springing from selfishness which was on the other side of the fence from that of Mrs. Van Suydam, was of a like strength of purpose. “I assure you that there has never been a question of such a thing coming about. This is a matter of business solely.”

“Business? Well, that,” asserted Mrs. Van Suydam untruthfully, “is beyond my province. I don’t—really—grasp what you mean to infer, by mentioning business in connection with my son’s wife going to a place like Hollywood.”

“It is purely a question of money,” Eva explained earnestly. She leaned forward, eagerly searching the face of the elder woman.

“Yes?” Mrs. Van Suydam injected into the monosyllable her inbred distaste for social mention of finances. She turned to me. “Mrs. Avery, I cannot express my regret that you should have been brought—against your will, I am sure!—into a discussion of this sort.”

“If you will let me explain——” the young woman began.

Mrs. Van Suydam made a careless gesture of repudiation. “Not called for.”

Once more leaning forward eagerly, Eva said on a rush of desire to be friends: “You mean that you do understand—you do really understand?”

“My dear Eva,” Mrs. Van Suydam suddenly attacked her, “why do you always explain? Is it because you suspect that you are—usually—wrong?”

Eva was fast becoming diverted from her object in coming here. She stirred restlessly. It must have popped into her head that she might better take her leave without more fumbling. But she made a valiant attempt to have her say. “It means, simply, that I must—I intend—to tell you why I’ve made up my mind to go to Hollywood to make some money.” And her tone, and the sparkle of her eye, said “So there!” She knew that she was being held off; she must have felt sure that the older woman would not listen to what she had to say; and she came back with a counter-attack: “Why is it that you refuse to listen to me?” It seemed to have occurred to her that if she stared hard enough she could compel not only the old lady but herself to go through with it.

If Mrs. Van Suydam felt the force of Eva’s will, she gave no evidence of it. She said: “I can give you no advice about schemes for making quick money, as I believe it is called.” The faint lines of her distaste engraved themselves around her mouth. “I can give you no advice because I can conceive of no situation in which a wife should not defer to the advice of her husband; and this I imagine you haven’t done.” She smiled shrewdly. “Besides, it’s quite evident to me that you’ve already made up your mind.”

Eva brooded drearily over the fire which crackled so genially and with such a warmth of home. Something within her intelligence must have said: “There’s nothing here for you.” And something else, deeper than her intelligence, saddened her, while instinct warned her: “Get out of this, now you know that this old woman has the power to shake you. Preserve your future, at any cost.” This, I was sure, she considered her integrity of purpose. She sprang to her feet and stood firmly; and in her kindling eye I saw her thankfulness that her feet were able to uphold her so steadily. She began her charge against this old woman. “I see no difference,” she said with scorn, “between you and my friends. You hold me off, and it’s for the identical reason that they hold me off.”

Mrs. Van Suydam, who had at once revealed that she was not unprepared for this change of mood, now raised her eyebrows in delicate detached amusement. “I had never dreamed,” she murmured, “that the day would come when I should be compared to ‘artists’.”

Eva was, however, in the full fling of her resentment. “You belittle me in order to aggrandize Nick’s puny little talent! That’s what it comes down to! You know it’s true: I can see in your eyes,” she wound up on a high note of triumph that rang through the room, “that you know it’s true!”

They had now reached a point over which I had vainly speculated. Did his family appreciate Nicholas’ career as an architect? I sat more alertly in my distant chair.

For a moment Mrs. Van Suydam was speechless. Her difficulty in accepting this from Eva was plainly to be read on her face; but whatever inner unsurmountable difficulty scarred her soul I could only guess at: it might have been that of taking from Eva her own estimate of her son. She sat with her lips implacably sealed and her lids drooping over eyes that might be tell-tale, and had it not been for the spots of red on her cheekbones Eva would not have been sure that she had drawn blood; for during a period which became unbearable she said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She might have been alone in the room. When Eva, rushing to throw herself at her knees, cried: “Forgive me? Forgive me?” she still did not look at her. She might not have seen her, for all her nearness, and for all of the fact that the young woman was weeping.

Eva laid her hand over her heart. She had got slowly to her feet and stood hesitating near the old lady. “I’m truly sorry I said it,” she began again to apologize. “I wish I could make you see? I don’t think that I intend doing these things. I’m impelled by some force within me. My life seems driven on by some force within me——” Because she saw that Mrs. Van Suydam’s ears were closed against her, she ceased. I realized that she wondered what to do next. But upon Mrs. Van Suydam’s lips was now a smile of polite boredom; so she might have smiled at simple-minded strangers who had forced their uninvited way to her fireside and who had not there felt at home. Eva must have acknowledged this look while she wondered at it: for how could she have bored? She began drawing away, irresolute and looking down at the small figure in the straight-backed chair.

At last Mrs. Van Suydam spoke. Her tone was charged with excessive courtesy. “My dear Eva, I must ask you to leave me now. I am not so young as I once was, and tire easily. I must lie down before I go for my drive.” She held out her hand with a definite dismissal. And instantly I knew that when the door of the Van Suydam mansion should today close behind Eva it would close on all hope of a mutual comprehension.

Eva must have so decided herself. “That’s that,” she concluded, during the space of time that it took us to walk around the corner and along Fifth Avenue and around another corner to the little house. “I’ve done all I can. She’s impossible.” She enumerated the many lines along which Mrs. Van Suydam was impossible.

As we came in sight of the little house in Eleventh Street, she made her final effort to throw off the effects of her encounter with her mother-in-law. “I’ll go to Hollywood, for all that,” she told me, impressing upon her own spirit her invincible determination. She recalled to me a recent experience: she had told Nicholas that she had felt the rush of wings through the little house. She had said: “If I don’t listen to those wings, what’s to become of me?” Nicholas, she said, had merely raised one eyebrow.

She halted on the pavement and looked at the façade of her house. Her gaze lingered. “I shall go to Hollywood,” she bolstered her courage.

PART FIVE

I

Several days ago, I was taken by surprise at receiving a visit from Nicholas Van Suydam. It has been almost a year since Eva Litchfield’s death; and during this time we had known scarcely more of his movements than that he was abroad. That he had recently come back I also knew, because by chance I had witnessed his return.

I had gone down to the docks to meet a friend who was arriving from Europe. It was a dingy day, and the smell of the ocean suggested but too forcibly man’s enslavement to machinery; for on its breath which could not rise through the fog it bore the horrid taint of oil. There was tumultuous noise—of winches, of the heterogeneous bulky things that are dropped into the holds of ships, of cart horses stamping their large hoofs and trucks unnecessarily back-firing. But on the cobbled expanse whose sweep connects the piers with the asphalt of the streets the maroon brougham waited, and enthroned upon the box was one of the two composed persons in New York. The irreproachable Higginson flicked from the ear of the off bay one of the few remaining horse-flies in town, but this necessary flourish of his whip did not cause a ripple of the puce livery. The bays were older; it was with more difficulty that he got an occasional curvet from them; but the brougham had been repainted and on Higginson’s top hat was a new cockade. For the little house in West Eleventh Street was empty; a renting agent’s sign creaked dismally above its white stoop.

I was early, and the waiting-room as disheartening a sight as ever, so that I hastened out on the stripped length of the pier. Walking slowly ahead of me was Mrs. Van Suydam. To all appearance, she wore the same garments which had decently restricted her form three years ago; the same bonnet-like hat protected the head it scorned to adorn, and drawn tightly across her nose was a wisp of veil which might have been cut from the same piece. But she, like her horses, was older; she went directly to the barrier and clutched it with trembling hands. There was no way of avoiding her eye, which finally rested upon me. She inclined her head slightly. The ship was not yet in sight; we would have some time together. I went up to her. After the most perfunctory hand shake, she said, her words dropping like plummets: “I am meeting my son.” I realized that she said this because, at sight of me, she had asked herself: “Why shouldn’t I feel free to mention my son?”

With equally savage intent, I threw at the silence which otherwise might envelop us the statement that I had heard he had been abroad since his wife’s death. She nodded soberly. She told me that she had refused to accompany him on his now accomplished pilgrimage. She had wished him, alone and free from feminine espionage, to plunge into the mild dissipations suitable to a young gentleman of modest means. That he had done nothing of the sort, but had immediately plunged into an orgy more to his liking—had, in fact, submerged himself in the joy occasioned by his renewed fond acquaintance with the architectural masterpieces of Europe—she had gathered from his letters. “Not that his letters are frivolous, Mrs. Avery,” she explained punctiliously; they had had to do with the surface of his life, she went into it. I gathered, then, from what she merely hinted at, that behind his letters was of course what he had not told her; and that the untold had intimately to do with Eva’s last days neither his mother nor I for a moment doubted.

“Mrs. Avery, you were unhappily present at the only two portentous interviews that ever took place between my daughter-in-law and myself. The stand I took I am satisfied was for my son’s best interests.” Sharply she inspected my face. Something that she denied by her manner had shaken her. She did not know how much of what she had said to Eva had been repeated to her son. She had no way of knowing what her son would think—what he did in fact think of things he might only guess. It was with apprehension, therefore, that she had come to meet him today. Herself incapable of suffering deeply except through her son, she feared what she might be about to experience through a possible devastation of his spirit.

She said to me that life had resolved itself into a pattern and she could almost see where the pattern ran out. She had used to regret that she was so much older than her son, while now she had reached the point where it seemed a fortunate thing, for of the two of them she at least saw that few things happening in life were irremediable. Things came about, and they all fitted into the design, and the repeat of the pattern was the next generation, so that there might be said to be a pattern for each family. And what she did not put into words I read in her bleak eyes. One brought a son into a world that one was powerless to order for his security; one stood aside while life buffeted him; and the most that one got out of it was the realization that life is a ball tossed from hand to hand, and that hands sometimes slip but the ball is not always lost. Her lashes were pushed up by her veil in a look of astonishment.

I asked if I might not find her a seat. She refused with determination; and I realized that she feared she might not be able to go on with the day if for a moment she slid into dependency. She stood rigidly upright, holding to the barrier with her gloved hands. Only with the backing of her spirit could she get through something lying dead ahead.

We stood side by side, divided by our memories. The sparks struck from the pavement by the hoofs of her bays, on her coming drive home with her son restored to her single-minded purpose, would be the sparks of the triumph that had lain in wait in her decorous breast so tightly buttoned into its absurd costume. This single-minded purpose might have directly derived from her old house, from its portraits, its family silver, its furniture that had never been neglected. I fancied that I heard the flap of the page which she, with determination, turned. Nicholas, the harvest of his soul’s wild oats garnered, would return; and, preparing for his return, his mother pieced together in her mind the things that had taken place: things she had seen, things she had been told and things she had through her motherhood divined—the mistakes of others and her own aloof waiting. But even now, before his landing, a faint uneasiness had evidently dropped down into her complacent knowledge that once more she was to have him safely under her wing. The tautness of her spare body showed at once that she suspected, and denied the suspicion, that they could never return to their old-time serenity. The most they could hope for was to shut, with the door of their house, the door through which they had ventured forth to play their part in the present life of New York. And New York as we knew it, by invading her home, must have begun to seem dreadful to her. I wondered if, with even her conviction of right, she could bear to look at her son on the drive downtown: for they would eventually reach the intersection of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Would she know, without glancing at him, that he had turned his head, with the fixity of a purpose to last him through life, that he might look east? I might have been invisibly in the brougham with them: for distinctly I saw the policeman hold up his gloved hand. Almost rising, triumphantly, on the box-seat, Higginson would give the impression that it required strength to hold in his horses. And, refusing to recognize the traffic lights, Mrs. Van Suydam would lift the speaking-trumpet to her controlled lips and direct: “Drive on!”

She must have been very sure of the nature of my preoccupation; she said: “It’s dreadful—and good—to be so old that one knows when things are impossible.” The sun had broken through the fog, but she looked as if she felt that the shadows of the pier were shadows waiting to engulf her and her son. She stood shivering. And yet, with Higginson, she obeyed her own command: “Drive on!” She turned her head, with that creaking turn of the aged, and looked me full in the eye. “Mrs. Avery, you know so much about the intimate personal affairs of my son and his late wife—” and her old distaste was on her face, and in her sharpened voice—“that I must ask you: have you the slightest idea what took place between them at the last?”

I replied, truthfully and with some wonder, that I did not. I explained that I had been out of town when Eva returned from Hollywood, and that before she set out for New York she had written me but one letter. I said nothing of the contents of the letter. Looking squarely at her in my determination that she should give me an answer, I asked: “Mrs. Van Suydam, how did Eva really die?”

She had turned more fully towards me, and as I spoke I saw her hand thrust behind to again grasp the rail of the barrier. A tremor started at her head and ran down through her body. She said simply that Eva had died of pneumonia, brought on, she believed, by exposure on the train from California to the East. But we had arrived at a state of tension wherein I almost heard her call out to her God: “I’ve never known all!” From the fact that again her dreadful, steady trembling took possession of her I felt sure that part of what had happened had taken place before her eyes, and that she had been daunted by it. In those quiet hours of the night when old people sleep lightly, she would forever after awaken to the same horror that had fallen upon her then. She glared at me, but it was an appeal. She gave the impression of wildly desiring to clutch some human being and hold on, and of a complete aversion to physically touching me because I had received her intimate revelations. But she said, directly to whatever I might oppose: “It was undoubtedly pneumonia. It could have been nothing else. The doctor diagnosed it as pneumonia. The way she breathed——”

“I meant,” I said softly, “her other death.”

She looked away. I saw that she took a long breath. When she again turned her eyes were under control. She said at once, then: “I beg you to believe me when I say that I know no more than you. What I may surmise, and what you may suspect, are probably different. But I shouldn’t be doing my duty to my son if I let you go away without plain speaking on my part. My son has told me nothing. So far as I know, he never had an approach to a quarrel with Eva.”

“Her friends,” I said slowly, “have wondered. You can’t be surprised at that.”

Her dry cheeks flushed an angry red. With her deep resentment of a mother, she almost hurled her words in my face: “How despicably cruel!” Through her frail body there now surged such energy in defense of her son that she might have been rushing at me with upraised fist. “How calculatingly cruel you can be, Mrs. Avery!” She closed her eyes: it might have been to recover her self-control, and it might have been that she refused to longer see me. “You force me to tell you something that I had never thought to let pass my lips.” And her eternal hatred of me because I forced her to tell it stared through her blazing eyes.

She had gone to the little house in Eleventh Street, running through the night because death had arrived before her. She had understood, from the message, that her son had hesitated to throw upon his mother’s age the burden of those details immediately following death, and that she had only been notified when she could enter on a scene of that dignity arranged by man to cover the careless arrangement of nature. Transfixed in the door of Eva’s room, she witnessed the scene on which she had sealed her lips and to which she had vainly tried to shut the eyes of her memory. And again, saying this, she darted at me her look of a terrible resentment. Not daring to withdraw lest her son realize that by the accident of her haste he had been overheard in his last appeal to his wife, Mrs. Van Suydam had then experienced the complete agony. For, before her shrinking eyes, her son came across the floor and took the dead girl in his desperate arms.

Mrs. Van Suydam said to me: “I am telling you this to show you that my son loved his wife. You can never after this suspect him of an indifference that might have caused her to wish to die.”

Her soul had called for help to bear it. She listened, because she could not move, as Nicholas accused some Great Juggler of having shuffled the cards. He had said: “Eva, you’ve always been so cold. I’ve never believed that you’d yielded yourself to me body and soul. Won’t you soften just once, and leave me that to remember?”

I had hurt her, deliberately, through the one profound instinct of a woman’s life, her child. An appalling disintegration began, running through her, turning her blood to water, I thought as I watched the resentment drain from her cheeks. She seemed to be shaking to pieces. She said under her breath—and I knew she did not speak to me: “Why is everything good dying before my eyes?” She held tightly to the rail while she gathered her forces.

I faltered: “I’m very sorry I asked.”

She lifted her eyes. Her lashes pulled against the mesh of her veil and again lent her her look of astonishment. She said distantly: “My son loved Eva, and his life is probably spoiled. He has ideas in his head which only time can eradicate. I am convinced that he never said a cross word to her. But, as you know, I myself had several conversations with my daughter-in-law which in the light of her death I regret. You will be doing me a favour if you tell your friends that I—and not my son—undoubtedly upset her. And, Mrs. Avery, you will kindly refrain from repeating to my son, if you should see him, what his wife said in your presence about his work.” With superb dismissal of me from her life, she put up her lorgnette and inspected me. Her eyes swept over me, remotely speculative. With the slightest of nods, she turned away.

The ship had docked. She clung to the barrier with both hands. Her white kid gloves, pinching her hands, must have supplied the physical pain she now welcomed. For she lifted to the deck, where she would see her son, a face from which she had erased all that would distress him.

II

Nicholas Van Suydam stood at my door, unannounced. He had not telephoned to ask if he might come, and this he at once explained by the flat statement that he had realized I would not wish to see him. With between us the memory of our last meeting, we stood mutually embarrassed. I wondered how he was going to set about saying what he must have determined to say when he took the step of coming to see me.

He set about it with commendable speed. “My mother appears to think that you consider me guilty of something dastardly. I’m not sure that, in her heart, she doesn’t agree with you.”

I watched him narrowly, perplexed as to how much she had repeated of our talk on the docks: had she, for instance, told him that she had witnessed the scene which had so shaken her at the time and which had shaken me when she repeated it to me? Cautiously I suggested that these things were no business of mine.

He looked me in the eye. “Eva told me she had written you that she had made up her mind to leave me.”

I sighed: “It was unnecessary to inform you that I knew—as things turned out.”

He said harshly: “I came here to tell you that she was about to leave me.” It was now his turn to sigh deeply; but his indrawn breath was expelled as if it were his curse on his fate. “The suddenness of it,” he resumed, “would have shocked any man, even one who understood Eva.”

I asked if he had ever felt that he understood Eva.

“I understood her.” Without glancing at him, I knew that he watched me. “She killed something in me. It’s resurrected every now and then; but it’s a ghost. Oh—I understood her!”

I stood in the window looking out at scudding clouds, which raced by in thin streamers of grey. Eva might have been drifting past, looking in on us, listening for what we might say. My eyes at once blinded by tears, I stammered: “Don’t! Don’t! I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why did you come here?” And I said to myself “I feel that there’s a dreadful mistake, somewhere.”

For he was insisting: “You knew, didn’t you, that Spencer Mapes followed her to Hollywood? You knew it all along, didn’t you?” He gave a short laugh. “It’s so plain. And I shouldn’t have been surprised.”

I came back from the window. “I knew that he was out there, and that it hadn’t necessarily to do with Eva. Why shouldn’t he go out there? What are you driving at?”

But if in fact he was driving at anything beyond his hurt bewilderment he did not at once acknowledge it. I thought that actually he had come to tell me about their rupture, and that face to face with me he slid against his will into his old-time habit of thinking aloud on Eva’s tremendous spell upon him. There was nothing to do but let him talk. Whatever question might be in his mind about Spencer Mapes must wait. “Perhaps I’d better take it up with the statement that until the night of her return I didn’t know that she was thinking of leaving me. She had said nothing of the sort in her letters. I was so bucked at her getting back. I had been lonelier than I had realized. She didn’t look well; said she’d caught cold on the train, and the change from the warm climate of the Coast was already making it worse. It was horrible weather—one of those persistent rains when April is cold. The trees were in bud, but they were lashing, I remember, beating against the windowpanes. Strange—how one remembers things like that. I don’t believe I can ever again bear to hear branches scraping against windowpanes. Her cheeks were bright red; and yet she looked exhausted. I suggested telephoning for a doctor, but she said ‘Don’t be absurd. I want to talk to you.’ She came and patted my cheek. You know how she used to say—in the most impersonal way—‘Darling old Nick’?” His pause was lengthy. When he did go on with it, I had the feeling of listening to thoughts instead of to words. “I never, in the course of our married life, had the conviction of having touched her in the flesh. It used to make me shy with her. And that last night she had a more than ever silvery laugh. I felt as if all my life I must stand a way off from her, looking at her with my arms hanging. It was the swift precision of her reply to what I asked her: ‘Of course I love you.’” He sat tapping a cigarette on the back of his hand. His eyes were fixed on the cigarette, as if it were an important thing. When he again looked at me, he said: “I find this very difficult.”

Panic seized me. “Don’t tell me—please don’t tell me——” I doubted that I could bear it. The wind was moaning, going around and around my tower room. I felt as if Eva were more intently looking in, as if she were reproaching me with “How can you listen to things against me?” I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek. But his voice droned on, and beat my nerves into a dulled peace.

“I was so glad the surface of her writing-table had been polished for her home-coming; because she leaned against it: her hands rested on it. She was leaning back against the desk, but her shoulders were thrust forward; she gave me the impression of being prepared for me to charge at her and therefore in need of solidarity behind her. That room of hers had a glow, hadn’t it? The glow shone on her, and her hair——” He paused. “She was an unapproachable saint. But a man can’t derive solace from the evidence of his eyes.” His pause, this time, was longer. “By the way, I noticed that her eyes were extraordinarily brilliant. She never removed them from my face; they were so still that they were like the eyes of a vision.” He had wondered, he said, if she wished for ardour, or if she fearfully anticipated it. She had seemed suspended between two menaces.

“She wanted help!” I cried to him. “Can’t you see that she wanted help?”

I saw, now, that there were new lines on his face. His mouth was more like his mother’s. He would be a grim man, soon. He asked me if I had ever noticed how easily she waved aside the point of view of another? Not a motion of her hands, and yet she would have definitely waved away what she did not wish to consider. She had said: “I’ve always been honest with you.” There was something ominous in this: he had not, at the moment, wanted her to be honest. An idea that had always been at the back of his head sprang to the front of his consciousness: she had never wanted to be a wife, had, when one came down to it, resented being a wife. When she shook her head, over his questions, he felt her shaking off all consideration of her life with him.

I asked why he insisted on telling me this, and he said simply: “She told you.”

“Not after she had seen you. She might never have told me these details of the break with you.”

But he said: “Oh, yes, she would.” He was increasingly agitated, and through his emotion became reluctant to go fully into what nevertheless he doggedly told me. I reflected that if I refused to hear him out he would tell his mother. He had arrived at the stage where he was impelled to tell some mute and horrified woman. He became self-hypnotized, almost acting the ensuing scene between himself and his wife.

It had been a strange and cruel feature of it that her tea roses were more humanly pitying than she; for they had given out to him a breath of home. “And don’t you think, Dinah, that sometimes a merciful lie is the act of a compassionate God?” He did not say what he had wished her to lie about. Each minute had been as long as a man’s life. There had been a drag in time itself that dulled the nerves. For she was so clear and direct, when she made her wishes plain, that she might not have realized it was her husband to whom she made such a proposal. He had asked what she wished him to do, and she had said “Nothing. What on earth should I wish you to do?” However, it had seemed not to impress him, that she thus sacrificed his future freedom while claiming her own: there was something more dreadful on his mind. Telling me of it—and not telling me the black thing in his mind—he paced the length of my room, his head bent and his gaze on the floor. He could not, for a while, rouse himself from a creeping paralysis of the senses. He must have so paced when he cautioned himself to have patience with her. He had said to her—speaking with great self-control, he assured me: “I acknowledge I don’t see what you mean. You’re usually inconsistent; but this time you’ve gone beyond the reasoning faculties of a mere man.” He said that he listened to his own voice, and that it had not revealed his rising fury. And then he was aware that his voice had flattened, and that he was assuring her that she should have her divorce. “Only make it as quiet as possible, on account of my mother.”

She had stared at him, he reported; he had noticed that her eyes had blared wide open. “Can’t you understand,” she had demanded impatiently, “that I don’t want a divorce? That I don’t need a divorce? Why should I want a divorce, when God knows I’ve had enough of marriage?” She had immediately changed to softness, and had added: “I think we could be friends. We’d be so much better friends if we were separated.”

He said he had then roared at her: “God, Eva!” And she had advanced, tentatively, as if not sure whether she wished it: “We could have Christmas together; and we might write to each other.” As he told me this, his voice followed his wrath to a higher pitch. “I said to her: ‘It’s Mapes, I daresay.’ I had just heard, incidentally, that he was out there. And she laughed—laughed heartily, as if I were trying to be amusing. It got me. I’ll admit that at once I knew how I had always feared Mapes. I think I struck my fist on her writing-table, and shouted ‘Christ!’ My voice was so loud that it made me jump. When I cleared my throat—because suddenly it had closed up—the rasp of it seemed, in my ears, to beat against the mountain of her meaning, and fall, and come back at me to hurt my head. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I said to her. I spoke in a new queer soft voice: maybe she didn’t hear. And then—I remember, now—I kept on saying: ‘Now then, let’s get this straight. I’m rather at sea. Let’s be sensible.’” He stared at me with almost ludicrous surprise. “For was it sensible, for her to keep on with ‘Do be nice about it, Nick?’”

“I’m trying to make out why you couldn’t understand,” I said.

“What did she want?” he shouted. “What under heaven did she want?” To this he eventually added: “She didn’t want me. I couldn’t fool myself that she wanted me; in fact, she said plainly that what she wanted with me was a safe harbour, to which she could set sail when in distress. That’s not the right thing for a woman to say to her husband. It came down to this, that she meant to stay away from me except when she should need me to pull her out of trouble. She didn’t need me around every day.”

I said: “She didn’t need a man around every day.”

He dwelt on this in bewilderment. “She made it plain that she didn’t need me around at all! How did I fail to make myself indispensable to her?” And, in contradiction to his previous assertion, the quaver of his voice proved that he still loved her.

I was kind when I replied to this; but I had decided that we had for a long enough time beaten around the bush. “The truth about Eva was that she couldn’t, constitutionally, combine work and marriage. And she cared more for work.”

We were at cross purposes: he almost screamed: “But Spencer Mapes!”

“So this,” I said slowly, “is what you’ve been believing all this time?”

At this he halted, in his restless prowling of the room, and stood in front of me. In his blazing eyes I read all that he had believed during the brief interlude of his marriage. “What, then, did she write you?”

“Just what I’ve said: that at last she saw clearly—that at last she had made up her mind to walk alone.” I added, letting him have it: “That lets both you and Spencer Mapes out.”

He dropped into a chair. He looked beaten. He stared straight before him, and his hands hung flatly, bonelessly, over the arms of the chair. I noticed that he was older than I had thought.

I wailed: “Oh, Nicholas, surely you remember that she was a singularly cool and aloof woman? Surely, with that in mind, you should have understood?”

He was not listening, except to whatever might be echoing in his memory. He had wished to be reassured; and he was now sure; and over his spirit, like a smothering pall, had dropped the dreadful sense of futility. And he said, finally, the most irrelevant thing. “I’m glad your windows are above the trees. Trees are sometimes curious about what’s going on in a room, and malevolent.”

The treacherous female instinct for taking care of the male when he is in trouble overcame me, and I hurried to the kitchenette to mix him a drink. But, to a greater extent than he seemed, he must have been aware of his surroundings, for he said at once: “No whiskey! After I’ve told you what now I must tell you, you will see that—that just this minute I can’t stand the thought of whiskey.” Of what it had it in its power to remind him, beyond what he had already told, I could not imagine; and because I did not wish to hear it, and because my pity for him had been short-lived, I said, outrageously, that he could then have gin. This was wasted on him, I am glad to say; without further preamble he swept into it.

Eva’s study had suffocated him, that night, and he had gone across to the window and opened it to the fresh air. And the rain had driven in on him, while the branches of the trees in the back garden had whipped at him. He told me that he was thinking how no man would ever possess her. Eva was a being of another plane, and he was looking in at nightmare. He heard her say that she was cold, and replied: “What’s needed in here is something natural. Air is the only natural thing left to you and me.” He stood in the open window for a long time, and it did him good, easing the tension of his nervous rage.

She muttered something about being chilled because it had been so very warm in Los Angeles. And, his brain again inflamed by this mention of the geographical location of Hollywood, he came back to the spiritual significance of it and slipped the control for which he had fought. “I’ve always known that Mapes would break us up.” These bitter words he said so quietly that she settled down in her armchair with a sigh of relief. She leaned back and closed her eyes. During the interval of his trip downstairs for drinks, he brooded over that peaceful closing of her eyes: so she trusted him! She wished to have him—the trustworthy man—always in her background.

He had so far gone back in his mind that his voice, as he recounted the following incidents of the night, was brutal.

He went upstairs with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He almost took me step by step up the stairway, he so carefully told his tale.

She said: “It’s very late, Nick. Don’t you think we might finish this at another time?”

He said: “We’ll finish it tonight.” He handed her a drink. She had fallen back in the chair. Even when he stood over her with the glass she did not look up from what seemed a pose of drooped eyelids. He had thought her shamming—that is, he acknowledged, if he actually thought about it. “Take a drink,” he said stridently. “We’ll drink over this thing. I used to discourage your drinking. This shows! Take a drink!”

Her teeth, he remembered now, chattered as she said she did not want the drink.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, with pleasure in his brutality. “Are you afraid of me?”

She said: “It’s just that I’m so cold.”

“Take the drink; drinks warm one.” He had forgotten the open window. He looked at her curiously. What was it she feared he would do to her? She stared at him, fascinated as a bird in front of a snake. He lifted his glass and glared at her over its rim. “Here’s to the cleaning of the stables!”

She cried eagerly: “Oh, Nick—you do understand? That’s the way I feel about it.”

He told me that, for the second time in the course of the night, he roared: “God—Eva!”

She sighed: “You’re hard. You’re like a rock, and I dash my life out at your feet.”

He growled: “Don’t be literary. I’m fed up with that tripe.” He sat slumped in his chair. “I hope to God,” he said impressively, “that I’ll never again run afoul of a literary person!”

He lifted heavy eyes to me. “You see? I was hard as a rock, as she said. But I beg you to bear in mind that I believed Mapes to be responsible. I said to her: ‘You need a heavy-fisted beast. You’d eat the artist who got you—eat him raw. You need to be knocked down. I wonder if Mapes knows how to knock anyone down?’ Oh—I sneered! She was breathing in an odd way—shallow, you know. But I was tremendously wrought up; I didn’t think, at the time, that this might not be fear of my anger. And she shrugged, and said ‘What’s the use?’ I kept pounding on her. I said: ‘I suspect you’ll say next that with your genius—the claims of your genius, the right of your genius to devour every other right in the world——’ And she said—she was all but supplicating, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live: that she supplicated me and I turned a deaf ear——”

There is a ghastly feature of tragedy: at one point or another the listener laughs out loud—laughs with frenzy, with tears streaming down the face, choking, gasping, beyond control in this confusion of the physical with the emotional. I laughed because Eva would have been disgusted with him for his phraseology.

He turned very pale. “What can you see to laugh at?”

I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I went on hurriedly: “You would never understand why I laughed.”

He muttered: “You must have caught that from Eva.” But he went on. I got the impression of a long and dreadful struggle on Eva’s part to find relief—relief which, at first mental, finally turned physical. She would attempt to speak, and he would talk her down. He would say, his hand upraised against an interruption: “I know you’re good at words. But they won’t help you now; you’ve got beyond words.” His hard eyes rested accusingly on her. But what they saw was not Eva but life in its futility, and what he felt was that life had no meaning, or, if it had, it had long since escaped man’s understanding. He felt all at once tired and old. Profound gloom enveloped him, touching his soul with its chilly fingers. He began walking heavily up and down Eva’s study; he did not know what to say next. He seemed, to himself, to have put into words all of the festering thoughts that he now realized had lurked within his mind for some time. And still he did not actually see Eva, there before him: she was a symbol of the irony of life. But he must have hovered over her as she shrank back in her armchair, for she screamed. He said: “Oh, I’m not going to strike you. The time for that has passed.”

He went downstairs. The rooms which were so pretty in the day, and so softly alluring by lamplight, were inexpressibly sad in the cold and struggling dawn which down the side streets fought for the right to birth. The various pieces of furniture were as if shrouded in mourning habiliments. The curtains at the tall windows, hanging in straight folds to the floor, waved fitfully; and he was at first too startled to realize that this was caused by the gusts of damp air coming down the stair-well from the window that he had opened on the storey above. He went, aimlessly, into the dining-room; it had the dreariness of a banqueting hall in which no one had ever made merry over food and wine, in which no flowers had ever graced the bare mahogany boards, in which no voices had ever been raised in gay badinage. He shivered. This was what he had left to him of his home.

He went back upstairs. The halls seemed to echo to his footsteps as if never had happy people run through the little house; the stairs creaked under his tread, which had grown sluggish with age in the lapse of the last hour. As he climbed the stairway he looked back at the front door. A door had closed in his face. But it was the door to a man’s life, and it had closed him in, on the wrong side for youth and happiness and on the side with creeping disillusion—the death of dreams.

Nicholas had told me this in jerky sentences. But he was more than ever dogged in his determination to go on with it. He might have been putting on a hair shirt. “I think I was what you might call out of my head,” he concluded his estimate of his experience. “I’ve only the vaguest recollections of it. I was profoundly shocked, you see.” Careful, as always, to be accurate, he added: “I remember my feeling, and not the links in what I did. And, looking back on it, I lose the intensity of the feeling because no longer have I the intensity of the conviction that then animated me. I actually believed, you know, that——” He was silent for some time. “I can just recall going back into her study to tell her to go to bed. Her head had dropped on the arm of her chair, limp and with her hair hanging forlornly over the chintz. I remember how bright the colours of the chintz were; I daresay it was by comparison with her white face. She must have been very ill even then. I thought: ‘She’s trying to put it over on me.’ I went across the room and shook her arm. ‘Come, Eva. This argument is over. Closed.’ She didn’t reply. She had fainted. I stood there looking down at her. In her bids for publicity she had usually made a better show than this, I said to myself. I saw that the whiskey was still in the glass by her side, and forced enough down her throat to revive her.”

He had made nothing of what she murmured when she came out of her fit of unconsciousness. She said: “Nick—help me! I feel so strangely——” As he resumed his pacing of the room, he had, he told me, glanced indifferently at her. She had put her hand to her head. “Nothing hurts, especially, but—” she looked puzzled—“I seemed to slip out——”

“You would,” he told her, at once brought back to the life that she was leaving for his share—blank of all that he had hoped she would bring to him.

She pushed her hair from her face. He remembered the time when he had liked to call her hair the wings of an angel. Staring at me with his tragic eyes, he said: “I know, now, that she looked like an angel always.”

He went through to his own room. He could not breathe, and flung open the windows. It was nearly morning. The dawn was trying to get above the roofs of the city. In the cold half-light his drawing-board mocked him. Life, for him, would now go on, drably, in the half-light. Clutched by the frenzy that all night he had tried to conquer, he rushed back to Eva’s study and seized her by the arm. He dragged her into his room and up to the open window.

“What do you want?” she cried in terror.

“To show you something,” he said through his shut teeth. In these few minutes the dawn had progressed. Over the sky there was now a wash of faint apple-green. The sooty sparrows had begun to twitter. Another day stared at them.

Over the tops of the buildings across the street arose the perfect tower, New York’s latest defiant gesture to a god of vengeance. His finger swept in an arc to encompass the city. He said to her—and it was a deep cry of intolerable pain: “See that? I could have built that if I hadn’t met you!”

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Table of Contents

- EAST OF EDEN

- CONTENTS

- PART ONE

- I
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- IV

- PART TWO

- I

- II

- PART THREE

- I
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- III
- IV
- V

- PART FOUR

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- PART FIVE

- I

- II

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