PART ONE

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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