Chapter X: Part FOUR: I (2)

I contented myself with settling back in my corner of the taxi and from my huddle remarking that at any rate most of us were bad off. “Our gills have dried, you might say.” I liked this simile more than did he; I noticed that he frowned. We went on our way in silence. The great towers leaned over us, threatening us.

He took it up again. “I fail to see what you’re driving at.”

I drawled: “Maybe I don’t see, myself. It’s the result of the weather. It’s depressing weather.”

Having let us in with his latchkey, he set me the example of tiptoeing up the stairs. He might have spared me this anticipatory alarm, for Eva was not at home. I saw that he was at once agitated. It amused me to observe that through association with us he had developed a theatrical attitude towards situations: he went straight to her writing-table, and on his now pale face there was a look of terror. Had there been a note propped against her typewriter, I was convinced that before opening it he would have thought of shooting himself. There was, of course, no note, and he glanced swiftly at me and smiled. I said, casually: “I had feared, you know, that you had got the idea that you were in love with Eva because you were dazzled by the fact of her being, as she undoubtedly is, a famous person.”

He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.” He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife, and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat. While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of your work----”

Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know anything about architecture?”

Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt but that, with inspiration----”

“Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and never can, understand each other’s aims?”

I said to myself--lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a whisper of desertion.

Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her. “I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family. None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather smother.”

Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders.

Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort.

“I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened----”

Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is to see that she’s not worried.”

“She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried sick. The town is on the run.”

“New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only temporary, of course.”

I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So nothing can open your eyes?”

“You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?”

“She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of, yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking sight in town--your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully.

His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked gently. “No, Dinah: I’m--I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a job: happiness with one’s wife.”

We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him, commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t. We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of glass let into the wall.”

He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.”

I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples, have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst engendered by the hunger-consciousness.

“You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned.

“Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them. The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man.

He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of glass?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva. Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night.

Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say----”

But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.

“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good, they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards our pane of glass to say goodbye--they were punctilious about this ceremony--he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas: I’ve got to have another drink!”

Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she wasn’t giving me peace?”

I found that I had crouched back in my chair--crouching away from what I had loosed in him.

“It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things up--arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously: ‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it--that only a man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had to listen to that God-awful term ‘sensible woman’ applied to her she would---- Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have this row.”

I saw that he had marked that in her bearing which had shaken him. It was shocking for Eve, of all people, to show uncertainty of her powers; but he had seen, as I gleaned, that it was uncertainty which was now shaking the foundations on which her life had been built up. Without her pride and joy in her talent, Eva would be a broken woman. He told me that she had all at once cried, as if she had read his mind: “You can’t take it in that something dreadful is happening inside me? You can’t comprehend that an artist’s imagination is a delicate, brittle, easily injured quality?” He had been thrown, by this, back to his cool detachment; although it was not in a spirit of cool detachment that he reënacted this scene for my benefit. He was immensely stirred by the recollection of it. In his intelligence he understood only too well that this was the pose of the creative worker in all arts save architecture, but with his heart he realized that under her doubts Eva’s beauty had faded. It began to seem to him that the conceit of artists is a defence against their own fainting spirit, which otherwise might cringe before the world’s neglect. But she had at once put it on him; she had explained that she felt as if she were beating her head against something more unyielding than the proverbial stone wall when she tried to argue with him. She said it was the fixity of his smile. “You don’t know how you stare at me!” she had said in what amounted to a shriek.

“This was where I was cruel to her, Dinah--and I know it now. I suppose I knew it then, and wanted to be cruel. You see, I don’t trust the influence of that fellow Mapes. You can never put your finger on Eva’s motives; they’re damned complex for a simple man to follow.”

“She is complex,” I put in. I wondered if he were going to regret having told me this. But he had to tell someone: even men feel the necessity to talk, I reflected derisively. “Her acts are necessarily hard to understand, although I don’t doubt that they are simple, and above board, if you could get at them.”

“Then what does she think--feel--about this Mapes fellow?” he asked urgently, but looking ashamed of himself.

I explained that she respected his judgment of her work.

He resumed: “This brings us to my self-charge of cruelty. I told her that while we were on the subject I wished to state that her friends took out the greater part of their sensibility in talk; and she instantly flew at me, although behind her eyes I saw the suspicion she fought down. She said her friends have a great power of belief, a tremendous generosity; and as to critical taste--well, then, if their judgments weren’t to be accepted, where were we for a criterion? I replied to what I saw behind her eyes; I said she’d better go in search of Mapes, then--that as his praise was so whole-hearted a session with him might make her feel better. As for me, I told her, I never got the feeling of sincerity in anything he said. She positively quailed. She might have been seeing a ghost. She begged me not to say such a thing. But I had stopped thinking solely of her. I insisted that he wasn’t an honest man, that he hadn’t an honest eye, and that anyone could tell by his voice that he was sly. She reminded me that he had nothing to gain. But she was at the moment arguing with her intelligence, I knew, trying to bolster her spirit which might turn to water. I was a cheap fellow to say to her ‘I have still to discover what he stands to gain’.”

He tilted back, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Now that she was not before him, to exasperate him by her swift changes of mood, to bewilder him by her illogical veering with the wind of her fancies and the shifting winds of her friends’ fancies, he fell into a state of belated compassion. At this moment she must have seemed to him, as always she did to me, a bewildered creature who was hag-ridden, who could neither take care of herself nor bend her neck to the care of another.

It was at this moment that the telephone rang. His face turned white. With all the ringing that this particular telephone did, interrupting talks between them with its insistent summons to the outside world, he still, at this moment, feared.

I heard the reedy voice over the wire: “Miss Litchfield in?”

“She’s out,” he responded gruffly.

“Is this Miss Litchfield’s husband?” came the squeal of Eva’s agent’s secretary.

His laughter making his response almost gay, he agreed to this.

“Can you take a message for Miss Litchfield?”

He said that he could be trusted with a message.

“Will you tell Miss Litchfield, please, that it’s all right about the Hollywood contract?”

“I’ll tell her as soon as she comes in.” With great care he replaced the instrument on its stand, and again leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He said quietly: “You heard? That’s what she means to do.”

And again we exchanged a look in which we encompassed--and judged, and pardoned, respectively--all things about Eva. The silence became hard to bear. He got up and began a restless prowling around the room. When he spoke, finally, he seemed not aware of it; he was talking to Eva. “Go to Hollywood by all means. And bear in mind that you go with my consent.” He bit down savagely on his pipe stem, and no answering glow appeared in the bowl. He took it from his mouth, looked at it with interest, and remarked: “It isn’t filled!” He was painstaking in the refilling of the pipe. He said: “Both of us need a period of rest from each other.” He might almost be hearing her voice coming back at him, for he replied: “You said you wanted peace--repose. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”

I ventured something futile. And he looked at me and said “Huh?” But he gave a short laugh. “Dinah, you and I need a drink.” He went downstairs. When he came back with the replenished shaker, he said “We’re getting nowhere.” I knew that again he spoke to Eva.

The rasp of her key in the lock brought him around to face the door.

She stood arrested, looking in at Nicholas. She seemed to have been halted in some violent rush, so that even her heavy fur coat swept back like classic drapery. I knew that she was uncertain: her eyes showed a curious light flicker. And then, as she gazed at her husband, her face became compassionate. She was oblivious of my presence.

He said harshly: “What is this thing that you’re putting over without consulting me?”

She said: “I’m sorry, Nick. But it had to be this way. I must----” She stopped; and by her refusal to say it she left him to infer what he pleased of the thing she had been about to say. The lovely look passed like a mist, dissolved in her return to her absorption in herself. I slipped past her unnoticed, and hurried downstairs where my coat had been left. I closed the front door softly; I had no wish to be recalled.

IV

It was early on the following day when she telephoned to insist on seeing me at once. I demurred, and she asked simply if I were going to fail her. Her emotional crises passed like thunder-storms; they were dangerous, but left in their wake a freshened sweetness. I hoped that it was so now: she seemed calm enough, and neatly refuted my arguments against dropping my work immediately.

I advanced tentatively: “You’ve given up the idea?”

She said curtly: “I’ve decided nothing. Will you, or won’t you, come down here?”

“Soon after luncheon,” I therefore promised. “After all, I’m endeavouring to get along myself, you must remember.”

“All right.” The click of the telephone being replaced on its stand was almost simultaneous with the click of her words.

But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning--as if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to turn on--drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my conscience clear.”

Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what, in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust--” as if discussing a prima donna’s husband--“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your going?”

“What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had to talk over, Edgar?”

Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?” he asked me.

Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We left Edgar smiling like an impresario.

“Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.”

I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.”

I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is outside my schedule.”

She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see Nick’s mother.”

Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.”

She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed. “You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation.

We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side. She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door. She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really and truly like--lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.” As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house. She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today it worried her.

We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!”

I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the last thing I shall do for you?”

The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation; and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.” And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield, and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is, really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know--none better!--that she’s stupid.”

Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.”

I said: “It is so to me, also.”

There was now no politeness lost between us; and I had the less reluctance to intrude upon whatever conversation they purposed having. I took a chair removed from theirs, and resigned myself to a laceration of the sensibilities that I hoped to conceal under glacial composure.

The Van Suydams had the gift of their imposing silence. It seemed a long time before she remarked that it was a pleasant day. She dropped this into the well of silence as if Eva had been a chance acquaintance. It would not have mattered whether Eva found the day pleasant or the reverse, as it would not have altered conditions in the drawing-room if all storms had raged outside.

By contrast to the glazed surface of Mrs. Van Suydam’s fine indifference, Eva’s brusqueness amounted to bravado. “I’m going to Hollywood.”

Mrs. Van Suydam murmured: “Indeed?”

Eva must push against the erection of her mother-in-law’s impersonality; she was not to be helped: this much was certain. She said bluntly that she had arrived at a stalemate in her work.

“I don’t think I understand,” advanced the elder woman. “Naturally, I know little about it.”

Eva’s resentment flared. “You’ve never let me tell you about it.”

“I took it for granted,” rejoined Mrs. Van Suydam, “that you fancied I couldn’t understand.” She paused, and added, her face buttoned up: “I understand much.”

Thus brought to a pause, floundering helplessly in the hugger-mugger brought about by her mother-in-law’s will, Eva sat mute. Until this bulwark of Nicholas’ rights presented a weak joint, there was nothing she could do or say. And weakness of any kind, even, at the moment, the weakness of advancing age, was hard to credit to the list of Mrs. Van Suydam’s possibilities. She sat upright--she never lolled--gazing blandly at her son’s wife; and if there was anything to talk over, any loose ends left between them, it seemed a remote contingency from the standpoint of Mrs. Van Suydam’s own understanding of the situation. Eva, it was clear, felt a singular reluctance to speak. The elder woman had--although one began to wonder if even this ignorance could be accurately attributed to her--a technical ignorance of the craft of writing; but in her choice of words when engaged in an encounter she found no difficulty in making her shades of meaning plain. She put, now, only the faintest accent on her “And what does my son say to this scheme of yours?” By an inflexion she had repudiated, for all those born of the Van Suydam blood, any knowledge whatsoever of Hollywood.

Eva’s restless glance passed from object to object in the room. The stony eyes of the elderly lady remained fixed on her. What, she must have asked herself with natural irritation, would be accomplished by meeting an eye of stone? She said: “He doesn’t say.” She looked as if she might scream: I knew that she would scream, if Mrs. Van Suydam emitted her equivocal “Humph! Indeed!” To obviate this, I imagined, she rushed along with “I wished to--I thought it wise to talk it over with you.” She must have seen that Mrs. Van Suydam was making it impossible to talk over anything; but she must also, and immediately, have realized that she had come here because above all things she wished to break through the crust of this old lady’s resistance, to win from her one word of understanding, one softened glance of sympathy. Her desire was futile; and I saw that, in order to avert tears of weakness, of dashed hopes that only this minute she had possibly clearly acknowledged to herself, she began talking frantically. “You are a woman! You are a woman, too! And you’ve been married! You must have married a man like Nick! You could understand, if you would!”

“And what, pray, am I to understand? I trust that it isn’t a question of a divorce?” But in her eyes, which for a second blazed straight at her daughter-in-law, there was every question between man and woman and her revulsion to the majority of them; and by her swift advancing of her assurance that no such thing could be in the wind she proved its presence in her mind.

Eva’s repudiation of this contingency, while springing from selfishness which was on the other side of the fence from that of Mrs. Van Suydam, was of a like strength of purpose. “I assure you that there has never been a question of such a thing coming about. This is a matter of business solely.”

“Business? Well, that,” asserted Mrs. Van Suydam untruthfully, “is beyond my province. I don’t--really--grasp what you mean to infer, by mentioning business in connection with my son’s wife going to a place like Hollywood.”

“It is purely a question of money,” Eva explained earnestly. She leaned forward, eagerly searching the face of the elder woman.

“Yes?” Mrs. Van Suydam injected into the monosyllable her inbred distaste for social mention of finances. She turned to me. “Mrs. Avery, I cannot express my regret that you should have been brought--against your will, I am sure!--into a discussion of this sort.”

“If you will let me explain----” the young woman began.

Mrs. Van Suydam made a careless gesture of repudiation. “Not called for.”

Once more leaning forward eagerly, Eva said on a rush of desire to be friends: “You mean that you do understand--you do really understand?”

“My dear Eva,” Mrs. Van Suydam suddenly attacked her, “why do you always explain? Is it because you suspect that you are--usually--wrong?”

Eva was fast becoming diverted from her object in coming here. She stirred restlessly. It must have popped into her head that she might better take her leave without more fumbling. But she made a valiant attempt to have her say. “It means, simply, that I must--I intend--to tell you why I’ve made up my mind to go to Hollywood to make some money.” And her tone, and the sparkle of her eye, said “So there!” She knew that she was being held off; she must have felt sure that the older woman would not listen to what she had to say; and she came back with a counter-attack: “Why is it that you refuse to listen to me?” It seemed to have occurred to her that if she stared hard enough she could compel not only the old lady but herself to go through with it.

If Mrs. Van Suydam felt the force of Eva’s will, she gave no evidence of it. She said: “I can give you no advice about schemes for making quick money, as I believe it is called.” The faint lines of her distaste engraved themselves around her mouth. “I can give you no advice because I can conceive of no situation in which a wife should not defer to the advice of her husband; and this I imagine you haven’t done.” She smiled shrewdly. “Besides, it’s quite evident to me that you’ve already made up your mind.”

Eva brooded drearily over the fire which crackled so genially and with such a warmth of home. Something within her intelligence must have said: “There’s nothing here for you.” And something else, deeper than her intelligence, saddened her, while instinct warned her: “Get out of this, now you know that this old woman has the power to shake you. Preserve your future, at any cost.” This, I was sure, she considered her integrity of purpose. She sprang to her feet and stood firmly; and in her kindling eye I saw her thankfulness that her feet were able to uphold her so steadily. She began her charge against this old woman. “I see no difference,” she said with scorn, “between you and my friends. You hold me off, and it’s for the identical reason that they hold me off.”

Mrs. Van Suydam, who had at once revealed that she was not unprepared for this change of mood, now raised her eyebrows in delicate detached amusement. “I had never dreamed,” she murmured, “that the day would come when I should be compared to ‘artists’.”

Eva was, however, in the full fling of her resentment. “You belittle me in order to aggrandize Nick’s puny little talent! That’s what it comes down to! You know it’s true: I can see in your eyes,” she wound up on a high note of triumph that rang through the room, “that you know it’s true!”

They had now reached a point over which I had vainly speculated. Did his family appreciate Nicholas’ career as an architect? I sat more alertly in my distant chair.

For a moment Mrs. Van Suydam was speechless. Her difficulty in accepting this from Eva was plainly to be read on her face; but whatever inner unsurmountable difficulty scarred her soul I could only guess at: it might have been that of taking from Eva her own estimate of her son. She sat with her lips implacably sealed and her lids drooping over eyes that might be tell-tale, and had it not been for the spots of red on her cheekbones Eva would not have been sure that she had drawn blood; for during a period which became unbearable she said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She might have been alone in the room. When Eva, rushing to throw herself at her knees, cried: “Forgive me? Forgive me?” she still did not look at her. She might not have seen her, for all her nearness, and for all of the fact that the young woman was weeping.

Eva laid her hand over her heart. She had got slowly to her feet and stood hesitating near the old lady. “I’m truly sorry I said it,” she began again to apologize. “I wish I could make you see? I don’t think that I intend doing these things. I’m impelled by some force within me. My life seems driven on by some force within me----” Because she saw that Mrs. Van Suydam’s ears were closed against her, she ceased. I realized that she wondered what to do next. But upon Mrs. Van Suydam’s lips was now a smile of polite boredom; so she might have smiled at simple-minded strangers who had forced their uninvited way to her fireside and who had not there felt at home. Eva must have acknowledged this look while she wondered at it: for how could she have bored? She began drawing away, irresolute and looking down at the small figure in the straight-backed chair.

At last Mrs. Van Suydam spoke. Her tone was charged with excessive courtesy. “My dear Eva, I must ask you to leave me now. I am not so young as I once was, and tire easily. I must lie down before I go for my drive.” She held out her hand with a definite dismissal. And instantly I knew that when the door of the Van Suydam mansion should today close behind Eva it would close on all hope of a mutual comprehension.

Eva must have so decided herself. “That’s that,” she concluded, during the space of time that it took us to walk around the corner and along Fifth Avenue and around another corner to the little house. “I’ve done all I can. She’s impossible.” She enumerated the many lines along which Mrs. Van Suydam was impossible.

As we came in sight of the little house in Eleventh Street, she made her final effort to throw off the effects of her encounter with her mother-in-law. “I’ll go to Hollywood, for all that,” she told me, impressing upon her own spirit her invincible determination. She recalled to me a recent experience: she had told Nicholas that she had felt the rush of wings through the little house. She had said: “If I don’t listen to those wings, what’s to become of me?” Nicholas, she said, had merely raised one eyebrow.

She halted on the pavement and looked at the façade of her house. Her gaze lingered. “I shall go to Hollywood,” she bolstered her courage.