Chapter I: Part ONE: I (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wish I knew,” I sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are against it, then!”

He dropped into my turmoil “Why discuss this?”

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

He said smoothly that of course it was not.

“She’s so sweet!” I regretted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eva?” He was amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

“Eavesdropped?”

“You both spoke loudly,” she explained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?” I demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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