Chapter VII: Part THREE: I (2)

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 She has that dear little smile that’s the most withdrawn thing in the world.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.

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.

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.