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?”

[Illustration]

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?”

[Illustration]

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!”

[Illustration]

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?”