PART THREE

[Illustration]

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said: “You’ll spoil my coat.”

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

“Don’t be foolish,” said Eva.

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

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

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

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

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

Glidden enquired: “What do you object to?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trying to get rid of him?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said nothing. She retained her charming pose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What have I in mind?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?” he demanded to know.

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

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

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

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

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

Eva cried: “Oh, please?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Said young Guy: “Aw, shucks!”

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

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

And the city blew up in hideous noise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For what?” Not that I cared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None. But surely she would tell you?”

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

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

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

“She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t see that side of her?”

“Do you?”

“Yes. How can you fail to see it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Her work is almost precious,” Molly criticized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The people in the room?” he enquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

IV

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

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

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

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

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

She said: “Oh, don’t they!”

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

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

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

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

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

“And you?”

They had forgotten me. I dropped behind.

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

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

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

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

“Eva----?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said: “Stop that! You’re raving.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In spite of what?”

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

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

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

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

I sat staring, dumbly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“From what?” I demanded impatiently.

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

I looked at her. There was no obvious retort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting away from her husband and mother-in-law, Eva fled across the room. “I can’t bear another blow! Did you hear her? What does it come to--that I’ve worked, and sold my soul--when that woman asks what I’ve written?”

“Why can’t you laugh at it?” asked Florence.

However, to even Spencer Mapes’ suave interjections she merely shook a despondent head.

“This won’t do,” said the sophist. “You will have to get up your fighting spirit.”

She said nothing to this.

He pursued his theme. “If you are to beat her out, you must keep yourself in the pink of condition--like a prize fighter, if you’ll pardon the comparison. It’s no half-time job--building up a great reputation.”

She said: “True.” Her voice was discouraged.

He pushed it. “For the reason that women let other interests get in their way----” His pause was impressive. But his lips remained pursed for another cunning effort.

She appeared to be lost in thought. Her eyes were now fixed on him. I looked around for reinforcements; but Florence and Pomeroy had sauntered off.

Mapes’ hesitation might have arisen from a noble wish to be fair. Eva’s face was pale; her lips parted as if to speak, but she contented herself with another shake of her head. He said: “You mustn’t think for an instant that I’ve anything but your ultimate good at heart. I feel--to return to our unworthy comparison--that, in a way, I am your trainer.”

She said: “I know. It’s very good of you.”

He put a commiserating hand on hers. “Don’t be coddled the wrong way--the injudicious way. Remember you’ve your great gift to guard, and for the sake of that gift everything you may want to do yourself--as a woman--must go into the discard.”

A strange exaltation took possession of her. Her cheeks once more bright with the clear pink so characteristic of her beauty, she cried: “Oh, thank you, thank you, Spence! You don’t know what a friend you’ve shown yourself to be--today--at exactly this time!”

He stood looking after her as she went away; and I stood looking fixedly at him. He said to me, surprisingly: “It’s desecration!”

“Ah you frighten me!” I almost wailed. “You frighten me! What are you trying to do to her? You are revolting!”

“My dear Dinah,” he replied smoothly, “you never use the delicate rapier; do you? Your weapon is the battle-ax.”

I said: “What a friend you are!” I pushed through the crowd in pursuit of Eva. But she, on her part, searched for Nicholas. I caught her as she said to him, excitedly, that her brain was on fire, that it burned the inside of her head. She cried to him: “Do you realize that no one considers me? Have you ever stopped to think that everyone conspires to use up my strength?” Had he noticed, she enquired as if it were his fault, that idiot Molly Underhill holding on to her while she told her troubles? “People--” she almost raved--“should keep their troubles to themselves.”

Nicholas was mild about it. “Early to bed, for you. You are working yourself up.”

With her sudden compunction, she touched his arm. “Poor Nick! It was a sad day for you, when you married me, wasn’t it?” For a time she stood quietly, regarding him with kindliness. Then she shrugged. “But you would do it, you know. All right! That’s that. Find your mother, and we will go home.”

It was the next day when I heard from Eva the sequel to the evening.

Mrs. Van Suydam had sat erect in the taxi, resisting her natural fatigue. “We shall have a lovely Christmas, children,” she had remarked affably. “And I hope it may be a bracing, biting spell of weather, such as we had--I recall it vividly--the winter Nicholas was born.”

Eva’s interruption had been abrupt. “It will be a Christmas of work, for me.”

It appears that the elderly lady had protested. Eva had explained with scant courtesy that she must start in at once on her next book, whereupon her mother-in-law had called such a course, “in her condition,” suicidal. “Think of your unborn child,” Mrs. Van Suydam had persisted, driving Eva--so she told me--frantic with her insistence on the necessary sublimation of Eva Litchfield to the child. “Don’t push yourself,” said Mrs. Van Suydam in a voice of stern admonition.

Eva said that she herself spoke through set teeth; she was by now in an agony of determination. “I’ll beat that dreadful woman if it takes me years! And that is exactly what I’ve got to do--push myself,” she had finished in a cry on this her instant response to her own doubts.

The little house was cozy, and Eva’s study heavy with the scent of the roses that Nicholas kept on her writing-table. They stood looking at each other. Nicholas smiled, she remembered, but she knew that her own face was grave. He was still thinking, she assured me, of the emotion of the day when she had told him that she was going to have a child. Her hand, however, was at once raised against him. “Wait!” Held suspended in his recapture of the lovely mood, he did in fact wait. He was helpless, as are all men, in face of this mystery of the creation of another human being.

With the exception of the springing flame in her gaze, she did not move. She was arrested in any ordinary motion by the violence of her purpose. “I am not going to have that baby!”

She reported to me: “I saw straight into his mind. It’s easy to see into a man’s mind when you’ve been married to him.” He was conscious of his face. He had felt the muscles drawing tightly--drawn back to his ears, drawn around his nose--drawing his mouth into a new and strange mouth. In his mind that Eva so easily read there was a crash, as if a house that he had built had fallen.

She again spoke to him. “You might as well understand, first as last, that I have no intention of going through with it.” She said she began walking up and down the room. “I have my work to do. I have my career to consider. Let other women have children.”

And again she was very sure that she saw into his head, and she was not moved by what she saw. He looked at her with impersonal wonder; for this much he had discovered--that she was ugly. But he realized that he must say something. Eva reminded me that she had told me, upon another occasion when she had reported one of their scenes, that when he was exalted he was not under a compulsion to speak. He said, at any rate: “You would do this--you?”

She said to me: “If you keep your head, and watch--and you are a novelist--life is dramatic: isn’t it?” What she said to him was: “You are being melodramatic.”