Jean Stafford: Boston Adventure

HOPESTILL MATHER, when she came home from New York for the week-ends, was so disarmingly attentive to me that I came to think of her as an ally though I would have preferred to look on her as an enemy. On certain evenings, usually Friday, when she stayed at home, she invited me to come to her room where she served me hot buttered rum which she prepared with water kept steaming in a silver pot under a cozy. Frankly impressed by the way the Countess had been struck with me (To my blushing delight she said once, “Aunt Lucy is going to give Berthe what-for one of these days if she doesn’t stop telling everyone that she found you.”), she was endeavoring, I thought, to discover for herself what it was that had so rapidly elevated me to a place of honor in the salon. It was not, she warned me, a very high distinction, for the Countess was a little too hyperbolical to be taken quite seriously. She was bound in conscience, moreover, to point out to me that I had arrived on the scene just at the moment that Annaliese Speyer’s departure had, so to speak, left a vacancy. At the same time, she expressed her congratulations and told me that if I “handled” the Viennese properly I would find her a faithful friend. She had never been urged to entrench herself in the little society of the music room, possibly because, knowing too much about the Countess, she had never paid her the homage strictly required if one were to become a habitué.

Having gone this far, Hopestill decided to continue to the end and refilling my mustache cup with rum presented me with the bare and slightly scandalous facts about her cousin by marriage.

The Countess was a “natural,” she said, having been blessed with a perfect ear and with perfect taste. But through an inertia, deeply hidden under nervous energy and physical tirelessness, she had never supplemented her native and very considerable gifts with any study, was and always had been totally ignorant of the science, the history, the criticism of music. And, although she had no intellect, she had the intelligence to realize that if she were to be happy in the kind of musical circles to membership in which she was entitled, she must learn to think about her art and how to talk about it. The task was too enormous and it did not occur to her guileless mind to bluff her way through, though she was not above setting herself up as an expert amongst people whom she knew to be worse informed than she. Thus, in Vienna, her peers and her admirers were never permitted to make her acquaintance. At the same time, because she had been born self-conceited, she craved to be spoiled by something more personal than the press and more objective than her husband the Count, her doting family, her aristocratic but inartistic friends. She was ambitious for a following of innocent people. Consequently, she had divorced the Count and married the New Englander (whose name, for obvious reasons, she did not take) and immediately on coming to America, instituted these little musical afternoons to which, as a rule, only young people (“preferably tone deaf,” said Hopestill spitefully) were invited. And now, if she were threatened by one of her guests who was disobeying the rules and learning something about music, she could take refuge in her difficulty with the English language. The audacious guest was shortly dropped.

I asked Hopestill if this, then, accounted for her treatment of Gerhardt Preis. “In a way, yes,” she replied. “But there’s more to it than that. That part of Berthe is more complicated.” She told me that the Countess had deliberately made the young man fall in love with her while he was teaching her the harpsichord, for, it was generally assumed, she far preferred his enraptured looks and his mash notes sent with the yellow roses he showered upon her to any formal discussions of the music she was studying, and because Preis spoke German she could not pretend not to understand him. Then, having extracted his usefulness from him and far outstripping him in her management of the instrument, she got rid of him. Here the second of her peculiarities entered in. Apparently it would have been simple enough to keep him on tenterhooks indefinitely, to make his lips always the vehicle of nothing more dangerous than professions of love. And it would have seemed that keeping him by her would be greatly to her advantage since everyone knew that his virtuosity promised him an eminent career. Why not, then, since his sting was removed, save him as an ornament for her salon? The fact was that she disliked men.

I must have shown by my face how shocked I was at this revelation, for Hopestill hastened on to assure me that her cousin was not a Lesbian, was probably not even conscious that she preferred women to men. (It had not, of course, occurred to me that she might be perverted in this way. What alarmed me was the thought that she might prove similar to my mother.) She did not fear them, but she recoiled from them in a frigid, old-maidish way, and unlike Miss Pride who could join the gentlemen almost as a gentleman herself, she was ill at ease in their company, embarrassed, often rude, because her vanity warned her that they would make love to her. The third gift of her fairy godmother (the first two being talent and self-esteem) was a stern, intuitive moral nature which kept her so under control that none but the most astute observer suspected anything irregular about her, but which allowed her to surround herself with girls, to caress them chastely, to send them presents, and to write them affectionate letters, indulgences permissible since they could have no consequences. I asked how her second husband had figured in this intricate pattern.

“Oh, poor Cousin Ralph was baffled by her, but he was grateful because she was so sweet to Amy. Aside from that, the marriage was a dud. She treated him like a butler—always called him ‘Brooks’—and wouldn’t speak to him before four in the afternoon when she was certain of having callers.”

“Do you think she’s taken me up because she’s certain I’ll never know the first thing about music?”

“She’s not that naïve,” returned Hopestill with a laugh. “Why, the Countess is certain of nothing, but she has her high hopes.”

The Friday evening conversations became, after a few months, an established institution. Hopestill told me frankly that she far preferred to hear my bulletin on the afternoon in the music room to going to parties. I obliged her, partly because I would not have known how to refuse, and partly because it was flattering to have so eager a listener and so open an admirer of what she called my “faithful eye.”

We who put in a regular appearance at the Fridays were all girls. Occasionally there turned up a pedigreed young man from Harvard or a European man engaged in some enterprise far afield from art. The girls were second- or third-year débutantes, girls in that interval between the coming out and the wedding. They waited charmingly and passively for the materialization of a husband. They made no effort to shorten the period of their retirement, concealing, as nuns conceal their bodies, the aspirations that fluttered in their hearts, but showed, by deferential questions and mild, general compliments to the correct young men that, as it was proper in society girls, they respected men as a superior breed in whose eyes they did, indeed, wish to find favor, but neither hastily nor through their own maneuverings. Perhaps it was their modesty that made them aloof, eclipsed their individual history, lined them up alongside one another like those rows of bathing beauties whose real names have been changed to place names such as “Miss Rhode Island” or “Miss Great Lakes.” Perhaps the modesty was their strategic principle and the one whereby they were the most successful because its employment was so unself-conscious. I sometimes reflected that they were like their ancestresses whose names and probably whose noses and eyes they retained, of whom we know through historical, sociological, even psychological studies as “the New England woman,” and whose personal style, whose distinctive behavior have been leavened by time so that we see as sisters and coevals and identical specimens Priscilla Alden and Mary Chilton and Margaret Winthrop, all dressed alike in blue-gray homespun dresses with white berthas, seated before a spinning wheel, all combining in equal proportions in their characters the virtues in whose names Pilgrim daughters were christened: charity, prudence, hope, faith, patience, from which admixture emanated dignity, loyalty, thrift. Now in these twentieth-century women, there remained all those traits but to no end (rather, to no end of which they themselves were aware) like the appendix in our bodies that no longer serves us. They were like ancient vessels the archaeologists disinter which have been revised by time and the earth’s chemicals so that the luster has been obfuscated by a patina, a marine green-blue encrustation, here and there punctured, as by a star, by a minute gleam of the metal underneath.

I had no communication with them. They behaved towards me with a warmth, a sincere interest which for many months deceived and flattered me so that I was at a loss to explain why they not only did not invite me to their own houses, when they were so cordial—even to the point of seeking me out in the music room—but that also, when I met them on the street, as likely as not they cut me dead. It was the very lack of condescension, the tactful omission from their conversation of anything which might remind me, to my embarrassment, that I was not of the sisterhood that finally enraged me. It was no ordinary snobbishness which inspired them, on meeting me, to acquire a burning interest in an object across the street, and, indeed, it was perhaps not any kind of snobbishness but merely another aspect of prudence, resident in them all, that like a fog concealed the roads branching off from the one they traveled which, because they traveled it in homogeneous company and had been set upon it by their parents whom they had no reason to distrust was, they knew, the right one. Prudence lighted them and made the pitfalls solid; prudence, like a composition teacher, assigned them “topics” to beguile the tedium of the journey; and prudence, like a duenna, supervised their romances. A palmer like myself, straying by chance and for a brief season across their path, was not invited, as a rule, to travel onwards, for they had been warned, as children are warned against accepting candy from strangers, that appearances are deceptive and one can no more be sure of the probity of a slight acquaintance than one can be sure of the purity of the substance under the chocolate coating.

They dressed well and without taste as if the caution of their forebears lingered yet. They had let modern fashion shorten their skirts in the daytime and lower them again in the evening, but had stayed the hands that would cut too daringly, would drape them too caressingly. So, at the Countess’ dinner parties (her “Saturdays,” as they were known) they appeared in evening gowns which were not memorable; pleasing, they might be, or quaint, or festive (which boneless adjectives Hopestill, if she were present, employed in her compliments to them). Their tremulous chiffons and pale crêpes, enlivened but unrewarded by a locket or a brace of gardenias, passed muster and no one noticed them.

Similarly, their conversation was lacking in excitement, though it was grammatical and scrupulously took into account the interests and prejudices, so far as could be determined, of their interlocutors. They had no affectations, aired no scandals, and had no discoverable attitudes save those they had inherited, like their noses or their jewelry. Their differences of opinion gave rise to no choler when they found themselves beside the heir of a different type of estate. “Oh, I forgot you subscribed to the New Deal,” would say the daughter of a laissez-faire liberal. “Don’t tread on me and I won’t tread on you.” Or the devoted sister of a young man, who wrote abstruse poems, would reply blandly to the boy who had attacked the “cult of unintelligibility” in The Harvard Advocate, “De gustibus. I refuse to quarrel with you on that score.”

I had acquired, through no endeavor of my own, the reputation of being “literary,” and almost every Friday, I was approached by a Miss Hornblower or Coolidge (who the day before had failed to recognize me as we passed one another on the stairs of the Public Library) who would say, “I’ve been hearing the most interesting things about you. My mother, who is a dear friend of Miss Pride’s, was telling me that you want to be a writer. Do tell me what you’re writing, for I’m dying to hear.” The notion, actually, was Miss Pride’s own and was derived from an innocent statement I had once made to Admiral Nephews. He, because when I first met him I had recognized the passages of poetry he quoted, thought that I had the same taste in literature as his own, and he used to bring me, the moment he had finished with them, the novels he had borrowed from a lending library, and which I was obliged to read out of respect for his thoughtfulness. I had at last grown tired of pretending to share his enthusiasm for books that were barely plausible and were certainly not distinguished, and said of one I had just read, “No, sir, I do not think it is excellent. I could write a better one myself.” This was not true, to be sure, and I did not say it with any intention of proving it, but the Admiral misconstrued my boast and acquired the conviction that I was secretly engaged in writing a book. He reported his suspicion to Miss Pride who did not bother to ascertain its truth and who henceforward told everyone that I was anxious to be a writer and even supported the fiction by such statements as, “But I know Sonie well enough to know that it won’t go to her head. She’s much too sensible to become one of your peculiar Bohemians.” I felt like the person—the person we all are at some moment in our lives—who is asked to play the piano and who protests he does not know how, cannot tell one note from another, and who has never depressed a single key, but who is accused of false modesty and begged to run off just some simple piece. In vain the defendant repeats that he is ignorant, is let off with the threat: “Very well, but you won’t get off so easily next time.” To the girl who was dying to hear about my writing, I replied that she was mistaken, that I had no such lofty opinion of myself, and she would say, exactly like the hostess who swears she has often heard us play, “You writers are all alike. I suppose you won’t even tell me where you publish your stories?”

The Countess, making the most of my imaginary calling, directed our conversation, during coffee, into literary channels and I sometimes found myself being posed a staggering question about French poetry, for example, on which I was said by our hostess to be an expert.

I was genuinely fond of the Countess and suffered considerable remorse after I had joined in Hopestill’s laughter at her expense, just as I did when I listened, without protest, to trenchant comments on her aunt and on Philip McAllister. Nor had I any reason to suppose that I was not myself the object of that merciless judge of her peers, but on the contrary could fairly hear her say of me to Amy Brooks (as she had said of Amy Brooks to me), “She’s such a deliberate fright.” It was perhaps because of this sharp tongue that Hopestill did not get on well with other girls, like those, for instance, who came to the Countess’. She was not well liked and never had been. At school, she had broken rules, had been slovenly and disrespectful, and so lazy a student that she had failed to be graduated. At her début, one of the most lavish ever held at the Country Club (her grandfather had left twenty thousand dollars for this specific purpose), she had drunk so much champagne that she could remember no one’s name, could barely dance in time to the music, and had been insufferably rude to several older people. She was, moreover, thought something of a slacker, because she had never sacrificed any of her time to “good works” and long after all the other girls, who had come out in the same season that she had, had dedicated themselves to nursing or visiting the poor or reading to blind old women, Hopestill continued to fritter away her time with all the indolent pleasures of the débutante. It had particularly annoyed her friends that she had steadfastly refused to take any part in canvassing for the Community Chest Fund but instead had “done her bit” by contributing a large check to the drive and putting the whole thing out of her mind.

Declaring that she found me a “relief” (I would have preferred to be a little more stimulating), she included me in most of her plans over the week-ends and shortly after our first meeting she proposed that she teach me how to ride. I had hesitated, fearful of the ludicrous figure I would cut on a horse, but she had been persistent and Miss Pride had welcomed the project with enthusiasm, for, as she said, “Anyone with your constitutional aversion to exercise must be made to exercise.” And consequently we went to Concord each Saturday afternoon where I was slightly more competent than I had hoped. Philip had been as ardent a promoter of the lessons as Miss Pride to my slight resentment for I thought he regarded them as a therapeutic measure to distract me from thinking of my mother, something which I rarely did save on Sunday when I paid her my weekly visit. As a result of his interest, he arranged to have us change into our riding clothes at his grandmother’s house and to have tea there when we came back from the stables. He nearly always joined us and drove us back to town.

The young man’s gallantry was impartial even in Hopestill’s presence and while I knew by the heightening of his color as he first caught sight of her that he was in love, he was no more attentive to her than he was to me. And I, having just come back from an expedition in which my performance had been at best tolerable and in which hers had been brilliant, was more nettled than if he had ignored me entirely. It was as if, on these occasions, he looked on me as an appendage to her. Curiously enough, I was conscious of being in love with him only when Hopestill came back to Boston. So long as she was in New York, I could hear his name spoken or even see him on the street or at tea without the slightest discomfort, but the moment Hopestill stepped into the house late Friday afernoon I was ignited with jealousy, made the more obstreperous because I knew she was not in the least in love with him. Particularly excruciating to me were some evenings when, Hopestill being otherwise engaged, he was asked to take me to the Countess’ “Saturday” and while I had spent the whole afternoon in a state of tremulous anticipation, my pleasure ended as soon as he called for me. He was either too absent-minded to hear my answers to his questions or he assumed an avuncular manner, offering me the most banal and unwanted advice on how to converse with my mother. In either rôle, I sensed his dissatisfaction at not being with Hopestill.

On one clear February day, Hopestill persuaded the riding master to let us go alone. “I’ll pay you double,” she said. The man looked dubiously at me, one of his least accomplished customers, but Hopestill snapped, “What difference would it make if that wreck you foist off on my friend did break a leg? Besides, she doesn’t go in for jumping.” He reluctantly agreed and we set off. Ducking our heads, we cantered through the brushy bridle paths and then came out into the open russet fields. Hopestill ran her sorrel mare over a rise and down and out of sight; presently, far off, I saw her hair, sharp as a scream and sudden as a flame, fling up along the ridge and for a space it flew, bodiless and horseless like a burning bird. I sat on a flat rock under a wine-glass elm tree watching her, while my horse stood near-by with a languidly drooping head, as disinclined for exercise as I. This was the first time we had ridden since early in December for it had been too cold. Today there was sun and air as gentle as spring. It was like the day the year before when Miss Pride had come to take me in to Boston. There was little essential difference, I thought, between that version of myself who, shabby and with grimy fingernails, had sat bewildered in the gloomy library and this one, pranked out in costly jodhpurs, waiting in a cramped and uncomfortable position for my skillful friend to ride back. There was a gross and disquieting discrepancy between my expensive clothes and my luxurious pastime and my little brother’s unmarked grave.

As I thought of Ivan, there returned to me the mood that had followed immediately on his death. It was a recollection, rather than a memory, a poetic farsight, a distillation of a feeling which was not watered down by physical details but was the dense experience of comprehending death. I did not envisage myself standing beside his cot nor did I, as I usually did when I thought of the scene, redeem the odor of the benzoin. It can be said that memory is a sort of entrepôt serving the busy traffic of the unreflective mind, and that its stores, behind an unlocked door, may be rummaged through and plundered at any time; thus I had found the footsteps of the old ladies walking in the sand at Chichester to match the lameness of Philip’s grandmother in Miss Pride’s drawing-room, and thus, also, confused by the music and by the stranger in the Countess’ lobby, had brushed off the dust from a forgotten incident and by a misapplication of the styles of sensation, compared the music to the sunlight of that past day, and remembered Regenpfeifer because I had been addressed in German. But recollection, on the other hand, is in more formal custody, can be seen only at certain hours and those being far apart, the time of day or month or season being rarely, or not at all, repeated. Thus we say of people who were once in love that they cannot “recapture” their joy and the words “I was in love with that person” are an historical statement which may be attended by illustrations: a café visited by the lovers when they were in love, a railway carriage where they sat with arms entwined, a shop where they met one day by chance. So also, when one says, “I was ill at that time,” memory shows him the mercury of the thermometer at 104 degrees, but neither the rapture nor the fever is revived. The essential has been extirpated, whereas it is the essential and only the essential that recollection values. Severe in its gleanings, it seeks to preserve our continuity: the old man recollects though his memory, we say, has failed.

With useless greed I tried to detain this temporary wisdom, this growing pain even when I heard the rush of Hopestill’s horse’s feet returning. But the sense of death was instantly annihilated by the sound. At the same time, the power that had generated the intense and total knowledge had not been all used up, and being unable, because the thing was finished, to repeat the process that had transported me to the past, I directed the residue towards an envious hatred of the girl who had now ridden into sight. It had occurred to me that if I were not obliged each week to compare myself to her, to my disadvantage in every particular, I would be appreciably more urbane than the chambermaid from the Barstow who had not known what to say when she was asked if she were an Anglophile. I could tell myself that Hopestill and I belonged to different species and should not, therefore, be judged by the same standards. But this was cold comfort. As she dismounted, I indulged myself in a feast of torment, taking in her green suède waistcoat under a silvery gabardine jacket, her slender legs in black breeches, her eloquent hair disordered by her ride to its benefit. I hated her the more for her good manners when she said, “I don’t blame you for not coming. That bag of bones would drop dead of the shock if you made him run,” because she perfectly well knew that I was afraid. We sat in silence for a few minutes. Hopestill lighted a cigarette and meditated the smoke.

I did not look forward to the evening. At the bottom of the Countess’ invitation, a square of mellow vellum headed by a coat of arms instead of an address, the calligraphy of which was so elegant that the only decipherable symbols were the date and the hour (one could not possibly tell whether the guest of honor was to be a Belgian brain surgeon, an Italian poet, a Danish architect, or a Canadian bishop), she had written—this in a legible hand—“Nicholas Doman, charming, from Budapest, will call for you.” I was tired of the young foreigners she “dug up” for me. Their difficulty with the language discouraged and then annoyed me as did the Weltschmerz that was a property common to all their eyes. Or, if they could speak well, I was irritated by another quality in them, one which I could not properly define: it was a staleness or a frustrated sensuality or a womanly tenderness, or perhaps all three that sounded in their voices, as if they were visiting an invalid surrounded by flowers that had withered but had not yet lost their fragrance. In the cushiony cocktail lounge of the Lincolnshire, over the yellow, arid popcorn and the dubonnet, rich, beautiful Gerhardt Preis, whom I had met by chance in the Public Gardens, confided one afternoon in me that his ambitions were to live forever as a celibate (because he could not have Berthe von Happel) in a hotel in Paris and to write a book (he would give up music, inseparable from her) which would be the modern counter-part of Amiel’s Journal. From his homeless, continental Jewish face emanated the odor of pomade. In the vestibule of Miss Pride’s house, he kissed my hand and then withdrew into the dusk, stealing on his suave feet past Louisburg Square under the spiritless rain that had begun to fall. I was certain that Nicholas Doman from Budapest would not be as charming as the Countess testified. He would very likely be addicted, as most of her hangers-on were, to telling anecdotes in French.

I told Hopestill my dilemma. “Oh, well,” she said, “you won’t have to be stuck with him the whole evening. That’s the beautiful thing about Berthe’s parties, you can take your pick after dinner. Anyhow Philip will be there.”

I was not blushing. I had been too taken up with a plan to escape the Hungarian to care whether Philip came, but her accusation immediately elevated the temperature of my skin and my eyes began to smart.

She laughed. “Why don’t you skip dinner and go afterwards with him and avoid the Hungarian altogether?”

“I couldn’t do that. But I’m very glad he’s coming. At least he speaks English.”

“And he’s very fond of you, too.” It was a serious statement and I could detect no ridicule in her voice. She put out her cigarette on the trunk of the tree. “You know, somebody like you would be good for Philip McAllister. He’s a monkish bloke.”

“Of course you are. If you weren’t, would you have chosen to be buried alive in my Aunt Lucy’s house?” And after a moment, as if to herself, “Jesus Christ! How you could do it I shall never know!”

“Oh, I know. And so is my aunt. Poor creature, she deserves someone like you after me. Have you noticed, by the way, how much we would like to murder each other these days?”

I had, indeed, noticed that the girl and her aunt had found it difficult to be anything more than civil. Arguments arose at the dinner table over such trifling matters as the advisability of giving the Countess a set of artichoke plates for her birthday which Miss Pride thought would be welcome, or an onyx deer that had caught Hopestill’s eye. Or they railed at each other over the season of some cousin’s marriage or another’s début. Or Hopestill would contend that her aunt’s salad dressing was unpalatable because it was made with lemon instead of wine vinegar. Often I was called upon to settle a dispute. Invariably I agreed with Miss Pride out of cowardice, and while she readily used me as a court of appeal, she sometimes forgot, in her periodic scoldings, that I had settled an argument which otherwise might have gone on indefinitely, and she told me that she was by no means flattered at my constant agreement with her opinions. “I am an old woman,” she said once, “and it has taken me many years to develop my prejudices and my affinities. It is nothing short of impertinence in you to adopt them without doing any of the work.” Now on the other hand, Hopestill frequently expressed her gratitude: “If you hadn’t settled on the artichoke plates, we would have gone on quibbling for weeks.”

“We’ve disliked each other more since you came,” continued Hopestill. “But I suppose that’s reasonable. Do you know what is making my aunt’s blood boil now? She’s afraid Philip is interested in you and she’s perfectly wild that I’m not doing anything about it.”

“As you say,” she agreed, shrugging her shoulders. But she was not content to remain silent long and when we had got back to the bridle path, she said, “Really, I was quite serious when I said some one like you would be good for McAllister.” Her use of his surname unaccountably put me at my ease and I asked her why. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know if you’re religious in the least, but you have a nice sort of tranquillity about you that might turn into piety. Philip’s bound to get religion sooner or later and I’d be the worst kind of wet blanket. I’m like Aunt Lucy: I think of God as a great big man.”

I laughed aloud for what she said was so absurdly precise. It was quite true that Miss Pride thought of God as a big man who had, in misty times, drawn up the Ten Commandments, and about Whom it was in bad taste as well as half sacrilegious to talk. She had towards Him the same attitude as she had towards the figures of literature, save those who had died in her lifetime. They wore the same antediluvian halo which, if seen in the cold light of Boston, would have struck one as pretentious. And so, although it was fitting for one to have an acquaintance with God and with Milton, it was not proper to display more than the merest courtesy towards them. It was acceptable to discuss a literary person (or a religious one) to whose name could be affixed the title “Mr.” Thus, Miss Pride spoke of “Mr. James” whom she had met several times and of “Mr. Emerson” and “Mr. Lowell” (she had caught a glimpse of these latter two when she was seven years old); but as no one knew anything about “Mr. Dryden” or “Mr. Goldsmith” it was best not to speak too cordially of them. God was no more adaptable. With no intention of disparaging her, I presented this observation to Hopestill and she agreed with an amiable laugh.

“Yes, God and Shakespeare frighten her half to death. I think that’s why she’s so bent on making you out a literary person. She can’t ignore literature but wants it homemade and by someone she can eat dinner with. She tried very hard once to know Amy Lowell, but she never succeeded.”

My disappointment at this statement was less than my surprise, for I had conceived Boston society as so closely knit that it was as strange that two members of it were not acquainted as it would have been if La Grande Mademoiselle had not known Madame de Maintenon.

By the time we had reached the elder Mrs. McAllister’s house, I had recovered from my choleric attack and could look on Hopestill with equanamity. Fortified also with the knowledge that I could not possibly fare too ill at the Countess’ that evening since Philip would be there by himself, I was almost buoyant.

The old lady always kept us waiting for at least a quarter of an hour in the library after we had been announced. Then, the rustle of her black skirts and the tap of her cane apprised us of her arrival and we stood up as she, after a formal, “Good afternoon, young ladies. I hope you enjoyed your ride,” sat down in a chintz wing chair under a portrait of her husband for whom she still wore mourning, though he had been dead for twenty years. She had no sooner put her feet on the chair’s matching stool than she said, as if it had just occurred to her, “What do you say to a cup of tea? Perhaps they’ll have something in the dining-room for us. My grandson promised to call on me this afternoon and I must have tea for him, you know.”

Philip’s grandfather had one time been headmaster of a school so imitative of Eton and Harrow that the whole house spoke with a British accent. It had been Mrs. McAllister’s custom, in his lifetime, to have a “day” for chosen boys and because often as many as forty had dropped in, she had entertained them at an immensely long table in the dining room. Although now there were never more than half a dozen people to be served, twenty chairs were in readiness and as many cups stood before the tea urn. We were fed the simple food the boys had been fed: gingerbread squares, small sweet buns, and English muffins. On the preposterous plea that she could not handle “them all” by herself, she always placed Hopestill at the opposite end of the table so that the poor exile’s voice barely carried to us, while I was seated on her right (“I never have time to get really acquainted with this young lady”) and Philip on her left (“So that he can fetch and carry for me.”).

Hopestill spoke of the old lady’s “closed door” policy while the one employed by her daughter, Philip’s mother, was the “open trap.” The younger Mrs. McAllister joined us today a few minutes after we had taken our places. Her pretty, submissive face was framed with white hair, the overnight acquisition at the time her son fell ill of infantile paralysis. After kissing her mother and nodding politely to me, she went at once to Hopestill whose two hands she clasped as she cried, “How glad I am to see you! Here, let me feast on that exquisite frock. Who but Hope Mather would think of bottle-green velveteen this year when the rest of us are all in navy blue?”

Hope, complimenting her in turn on her hat, exchanged an amused glance with Philip while his grandmother said, “Bottle-green is very nice. Marian, would you look at this child’s nautical costume. I swear she robbed Admiral Nephews for her buttons. Why, they’re the real thing.”

Her daughter nodded and turned again to Hopestill. “When are you going to let me have the honor of supplying you with a dressing room? I do think you’re unkind to give my mother all the pleasure. I have three rooms that are never in use, and if you’d only consent I could have more than these five-minute glimpses of you. I’ll tell you frankly that if I once got you, I’d kidnap you for a whole week-end.”

Philip, knowing that his mother would make use of such an opportunity to satisfy so completely any curiosity the girl might have about him that she would never want to hear his name mentioned again, hastily interposed, “But, Mother, they would have to be driven from the station then, for they couldn’t possibly walk to our house and the walk to Grandma’s, as I understand it, is part of the expedition.” Both Hope and I confirmed him, but his mother was stubborn.

“Does anyone have a more selfish son?” she cried. “Really, Philip, one would think you were afraid I intended to blacken your character.” This, of course, was precisely what she would have done, by going into his inconstancy, his hypersensitivity about his back, his egotism, his carelessness, by exhibiting his ugly baby pictures, by telling damning anecdotes, by resurrecting instances of his devotion to herself and attempting, in the light of the latter, to make Hopestill realize that she must play second fiddle to her if the marriage ever came off.

The conversation, passing beyond the skirmish of wits, became general. Philip, casting a studious glance upon me who did not participate, said, “You must have given Sonie a run for her money today, Hope. She’s got the wind knocked out of her.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” she replied with a laugh, “she gave me a run for mine.” And she began to praise my horsemanship and to deplore my horse, inventing a fantastically untrue account of my bold jumping and running which I was too dumfounded to deny. Old Mrs. McAllister patted my hand, said she could tell by my appearance that I could manage any horse, called upon her grandson to agree that I was the very picture of a healthy athlete, hoping to embarrass Hopestill who, though she was sound as a dollar, looked frail, and had chosen, instead of normal pleasures, the ugly affectation of the bluestocking. “I think you’re very wise, Sonia,” she said. “Why on earth our Hopestill wants to waste her youth and ruin her complexion investigating people’s nightmares I will never understand. And as for ‘repressions’ and ‘sublimations’ and so on, I think the least said about them the better. Goodness only knows we have serpents enough in our gardens without importing any more.”

The ìciness of Hopestill’s smile was lost on her half blind hostess as she replied, “But, Mrs. McAllister, all of us are not so fortunate as you. My own garden was swarming with serpents when I first stepped into it.”

Philip’s mother, leaning toward her, cried, “You clever thing! You know how to get the better of my mother! Tell me, Hope, what sort of thing do you do?”

“Oh, I . . .” For the first time since I had known her, I saw Hopestill hesitate. Momentarily she averted her eyes as she jerkily returned her teacup to its saucer. Then, with a smile, she explained, “I’m not studying formally, you see, but with a psychiatrist. I see his patients and study their case histories and so on.”

“What kind of patients are they, Hope?” pursued the woman. “I’m really ever so interested.”

“Well, my man is rather fashionable and most of his patients are idle women who don’t like their husbands for one reason or another or else don’t have husbands and think they’ll go off the deep end if they keep on living alone.”

“They’re analyzed, of course, and Dr. Ragsdale gives them things to distract them. Ice-skating, knitting, growing herbs in the kitchen window.”

Philip’s grandmother was silent with disgust and then, in order to hear no more of Hopestill’s nonsense which she was pouring out by request to her companion, she turned to Philip and said loudly, “I want you to give your father a talking-to, Perly. He’s set on selling the Bedford Road house. I would as soon cut off my hand as see it taken over by a stranger.”

“And so would I,” said the young man in sincere alarm. “What gave him that idea?”

“I can’t imagine,” returned the old lady. “But between ourselves, I have never felt your father had much sense of history.” Philip whispered, “You have never felt he had much sense of any kind, have you, Grandma?” But Mrs. McAllister was not going to agree to such a judgment of her son in my presence, and she went on. “I have always wanted you to have the house when you marry. Did you see the enchanting little water-color Amy Brooks did of it for me last autumn?” Then, turning to me, “You must make Philip take you to see it some day this spring. You will not find a more charming place in all New England.”

The conversation at the far end of the table was lagging. Hopestill, getting up, said, “We must go to see the house some afternoon. It’s my aunt Lucy’s favorite next to her own on Pinckney.” She directed to me an ambiguous smile which I took to mean that she had not quite made up her mind to relinquish Philip altogether, but that she would let me know in good time if I might go alone with him to inspect the house.

“You three,” said the younger Mrs. McAllister, “you three are inseparable, aren’t you?” I knew by her tone and by the look of injury on her turned-down lips that she liked me no better than she did Hopestill.

“We are separating now,” said Hope. “But Philip and Sonie will meet again at the Countess’.”

As I was taking leave of my hostesses, Philip and Hopestill went into the hallway to get our coats. When I started out to join them, lingering at the door a moment to receive a final compliment upon my robust health from the old lady, I heard Philip saying, “I don’t need a procuress.”

The Countess’ “Saturday” was a formal dinner party for rarely more than ten, followed by a soirée at which one met chiefly Germans and Austrians who had had the foresight to leave (and in some instances, to leave with their money) in the early days of Hitler’s regime. There were, in addition, titled personages from other parts of the world: a Korean prince, a Russian baron, a Polish count. The Bostonians who came were either charmed by the illustrious company or outraged, the latter group maintaining that “these refugees” were impertinent and arrogant because they had the crust to criticize the United States and even, with supreme bad manners, to imply that it was only through luck, not through wisdom, that we were not ourselves ruled by a Hitler or a Stalin.

The dinner, consisting of many courses, was served by two fat, frowning Alsatian matrons, while the wines were poured by a little Hawaiian houseboy, employed, the Countess acknowledged, because he was decorative. Otherwise, he had almost no qualifications and cried a good deal for a female monkey named Lilioukalani whom he had had to leave behind. Three bitches, a schnauzer, a Doberman, and a boxer, paced the floor beneath the table or stood between two chairs, gazing first at one guest until her wish was granted and he threw her a morsel from his plate, and then at the other until he likewise succumbed to the plea in the piteous eyes. Miss Pride who, characteristically enough, liked dogs “in their place” almost never accepted an invitation to dine with the Countess, but if she did, she overlooked the dogs as one would overlook a foreign object in the dessert. Unfortunately they were particularly attracted to her because she carried with her the odor of her cat, Mercy, and during the soup, when they had no pressing business in other quarters, the three of them clustered about her legs sniffing. Her aplomb was admirable: as she drank her soup, crumbled her bread, and listened to the man from the Rhineland who was interested in guilds, it was not apparent that a debate was going on within her, whether to kick the brutes once and for all or to endure.

As soon as the gentlemen joined us, the door-bell commenced to ring and rang at intervals until well past eleven o’clock, bringing to us fortunate ten, a varied assortment of entertainers. Our hostess, immense and blazing in a diamond tiara and a cloth-of-gold gown which sheathed her ample flesh like hide and of which the central interest was a green orchid growing out of her mountainly bust, stirred her guests about, dispatching me to a Norwegian painter, Edward Pingrey to a cloth merchant from Berlin, Mrs. Hornblower to a young Puerto Rican of ambassadorial connections whom, unfortunately, it was easy to confuse with the houseboy. We were not allowed to remain long on any assignment. The Norwegian woman and I would just be establishing a communication of sorts after several false beginnings, when the Countess would descend: “You two charmers mustn’t monopolize each other! Sonie, go speak to that woman over there, the dark one, Frau Gross. She’s perishing to meet you. You’re much alike—imaginative, spirituelle. She’s a little deaf.” Frau Gross, more like her name than the Countess’ description of her, had not wanted to meet me, did not know my name, had not, in fact, ever seen me before and could hear nothing of what I said. In this enforced rotation one could hear conversations on German air-power, on French food, on Roman relics in England, on American politics, on European and tropical diseases, on coin collections, on train travel in the interior of China.

If one flatly refused to talk, being stricken tonight with one of those moods of taciturnity that visit us all, the Countess suggested cards in the library. It was not too happy a substitute, for she forbade such banal games as bridge or hearts, allowed only recondite or obsolescent ones like omber, loo, piquet. It was nearly always my bad luck, if I were sent to “make up a table,” to find Baron Kalenkoff and one other person preparing a deck for omber, the most bewildering of all the games. The Baron, a handsome, well-tailored man in his thirties, a cosmopolitan and sycophant of wealthy women, was, as someone said, a “rattlesnake” at cards. He had, in addition to that acumen known as “card sense,” such perennial luck that his adversaries regarded him with suspicion, not as a shark, for he was clearly a gentleman, but as the darling of some prodigal goddess whose invisible fingers distributed the cards in such a way as to make him invariably win. Now the only two people who had mastered the rules of omber were the Baron and the Countess and of course the latter did not play on her Saturdays. Consequently, the two of us who were obliging the Russian floundered in terminology without having the slightest idea of the procedure and lost all our money, sometimes a very considerable amount as the Baron liked high stakes. I might learn the “basto” and the “spadille” and the “matadors” of one trump by the end of a hand, but my knowledge was useless in the next when a different trump was named. It did not bore the Baron at all to play with fuddled opponents. On one occasion the nightmare lasted three hours and a half and was only concluded because supper was announced.

After that calamitous evening (poor Mr. Pingrey and I each lost fifteen dollars and I had to borrow money from the Countess), I did not go any more to the library, no matter how indisposed I was to chat with the Korean prince who had acquired the remarkable notion that I was an ardent student of pre-dynastic Chinese bone inscriptions, on which he was an expert.

I remained in the large drawing-room, the setting for our ballet. It was furnished with the gleaming surfaces and floral furbelows of Louis Quinze, whimsically repeating the colors and the materials of the costume of the première danseuse: if she had chosen pale blue, it was to set off the chairs upholstered in azure satin or the skies in the murals inspired by Boucher and executed by a young relative whom she had sent home at once as soon as he had finished. Another night, as if the looped draperies at the wide bay-window had not been admired enough, the Countess appeared in a dress of olive velvet and remarked, “I got the idea from my windows, as you see.” There was a profusion of bare marble infants attached by their umbilica to the central support of gilt tables, or sprouting from the center of their curly heads bronze candelabra with a dozen sockets, or standing in pairs on the tops of cabinets bathing one another or posing as if for leap-frog or simply peeking at space with their stone eyes. It particularly irritated Miss Pride that two spurious Watteaus hung on either side of the fireplace where formerly, when the first Mrs. Brooks had been alive, there had been a genuine Trumbull on the right and on the left a stuffed twelve-pound trout from New Brunswick, caught by Ralph Brooks at the age of nine.

This evening, Baron Kalenkoff at once set about to recruit five gulls for loo, among them Nicholas Doman who offered me effusive apologies in several Continental tongues. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed the approach of the Korean prince and fearing that if I were cornered by him, I would miss Dr. McAllister I cast about for an escape. To my relief, I saw Miss Pride entering with a young man whom I had seen here several times before, and I hastened to her.

“Your admirer is downcast,” she said, nodding in the direction of the prince. (She had no use for any race but the Caucasian and she believed that no one these days was a prince and that no one would be until a son was born to the English king.) “Where Berthe finds them all one will never know.”

The young Jew at her side gazed about the room with a supercilious detachment. “From an employment agency, no doubt,” he said.

Miss Pride, regarding his witticism as inappropriate, gave him a lacerating stare. “And what is it you do, sir?” she inquired.

Several times I had been seated next to the boy at dinner and each time had experienced a pleasurable shock at the resemblance he bore to Nathan Kadish. He was intelligent and insolent, and his voice had in it the same overstimulated quickness that had my friend’s. But I had always found in him something lacking but which I could not name. He seemed, despite his carefully composed effrontery, entirely innocent, like a hornet that has been disarmed. Tonight, a trifle not only showed me why I had never struck up more than the most formal acquaintance with him, but restored a scene in Chichester just as earlier in the day I had recovered Ivan’s death. A girl passed by and a breath of her lilac scent loitered in the air. The fragrance brought to my mind the last time I had seen Nathan and what I had said to him: “I love your birthmark,” but the words reverberated now with a new undertone and with the addition of two other words which had been elided, that is, “I love you for your birthmark.” And I knew then that all that had fascinated me in Nathan was his disfigurement, solely that, for I had never felt protective of him, had desired more than anything else to touch, examine, and discuss what was taboo. This self-revelation so appalled me that with a rudeness equivalent to that of Miss Pride’s companion, I abruptly turned as he was in the middle of a sentence addressed to me, and offering no explanation, walked away to a deserted corner of the room, where I stood, faking a brown study so that I would not be disturbed, as horrified at my sinister nature as if I had found the marks of a vampire on my throat. (On the following day, Miss Pride, never dreaming of the reason why I had gone away, congratulated me on my resolute principles—for she assumed that I had been offended by his insolence which, in her fervor, she believed was incarnate in all Jews—saying, “I would have done the same. Courtesy to a discourteous Jew is beating one’s head against a stone wall. And yet I, despite my strong feelings, could never have done what you did.”) And I wondered if I would have coveted Philip McAllister if he had not been deformed. Dizzied by this symptom of an abnormal and somewhat repulsive nature in myself, I felt the need to be reassured, but paradoxically, the only person who could reassure me was Philip himself. The moment I had formulated the speech I would make to him when I asked his advice, I realized that I was really not in the least troubled by my perverse taste in men, that I had only been seeking an excuse to occupy his attention with my problems. I suppose that I was determined to be in love at whatever cost.

The Countess was surrounded by her guests who were pleading with her to play for them. The Korean prince had attached himself to Miss Pride and was no doubt lecturing her on bone inscriptions. No one noticed me as I left the room, picking up as I went out, a “fine” edition of Heine’s poems, the sort of book to be found all over the house, expensive, delightful to the touch, kept pliable and burnished by a man who came to oil them twice a year. Reconnoitering at the foot of the stairs, I heard nothing save the voices above me, muffled into one, monotonous and fluid, and the occasional chime of metal from the subterranean kitchen. Then I sat primly down on the yellow sofa, letting the book fall open where a red ribbon marked a former reader’s place. It was then that I was ashamed of coming down so frankly to waylay Philip, for, although I could not understand the poem, certain phrases, ironic, overharsh out of their context, stood out and served to dismantle me and the room of our reality, so that the lurching shadows, brandished by the candles, the histrionic portrait, the off-beat of my heart like a mis-set metronome became the properties of something third-rate and sentimental: I was like the hoydenish girl growing into womanhood who finds the foretaste of maturity cloying, drives back her unwilling body, partially relaxed in the bud of the bloom, to tomboy pranks. I wanted to get up from the sofa and go back to the drawing-room, but I did not move and told myself that it was absurd to regret what had not happened, that in all likelihood I would do nothing regrettable, but that it would be a test of my strength to remain.

The door-bell rang. I heard the butler pad out of the dining-room and his “Good evening, Dr. McAllister. You’ll find them in the drawing-room.” I had risen and could see, along the wall, his unaccompanied shadow advancing toward the turn in the lobby. My self-denial, in the half-second before we were face to face, held me poised, but when he had stepped around the corner, my resolve collapsed because the thought that came to me was not, “He has come at last,” but “He has come alone for the first time,” and I was less conscious of his presence than I was of Hopestill’s absence. Thus, when I stepped forward, my gesture was annihilatory, was the action of jealousy so unreasonable and eyeless that neither love for him nor hate for her entered as items in its muddled contents. I stood, an awkward girl of nineteen, with one hand holding the book opened to “Enfant Perdu” and the other grasping the young man’s shoulder, and I imprinted on his mouth a lightning-paced and pastoral kiss. There was not, as I wished, a pit of impenetrable darkness to receive me. I tottered back a step and let my hand fall from Philip’s shoulder. As if to steady me, he took my hand and I was again propelled towards him while, by way of recognition, he spoke my name, or as by way of prelude, admonitory or consoling, of the kiss with whose ruthless luxury he sought to shake the flesh from my bones. Its abrupt urgency was unmodified, but, like a sudden shaft of blinding light cast by a random luminary, it revealed to us both a principle, a basic form as simple, as abstract as the line between two points. We stepped apart, prepared to partition and bury the sheer serpent. He continued to hold my dry and bloodless hand.

Neither of us spoke, and I, glad that the incident was over and taking his silence as a token that what had just passed between us was not to be incorporated into our relationship (that, being an accident, it deserved neither apology nor analysis), started toward the stairs. But Philip detained me. “We’ll go in together,” he said.

I was uneasy when we entered the drawing-room together, certain that the hubbub in my mind would be visible in my face. Miss Pride, still listening courteously to the Korean, missed nothing, but turned upon us those yellow and accomplished eyes which accused me of committing an outrage. I looked away but Philip returned her stare and said to me, “The effect was just what I wanted.”

Miss Pride, scrupulously faithful to her word, did not deprive me of companionship. From time to time, she summoned to dinner a group of people near my own age who, although they were well-born and well-educated, did not belong, and never would, to her sphere, but to a frustrated imitation of it. The young men, who showed by their faces and their manners that they came from good families, revealed by their clothes that they were not well off, while the girls, students for the most part from Radcliffe, had sublimated their natural longings for dress and parties into a defiant intellectuality, terrifying to someone like myself. The dinner parties were formal and while we were having our cocktails and elaborate canapes in the drawing-room, Miss Pride, grouping us together, attempted to break down the barriers between herself and them and between them and me. And if she succeeded at all and with the help of the Martinis we were talking with a minimum of restraint, our discomfort immediately returned when she, our only leaven, set down her glass and announced, “And now I’m going to leave you to yourselves. You won’t want to be bored by an old woman. As my father used to say, no Utopia can destroy the aristocracy of years and the older one grows the more inferior one’s caste. Good evening, I must hurry on to my fellow plebeians.” She left us. A quarter of an hour elapsed before dinner was served and the cocktail shaker was empty. As she had not commissioned me to refill it, I dared not go back to the pantry in the fear that the vermouth and gin had already been put away and that I would return empty-handed, unable to explain my failure to my guests. A hush then fell upon us and continued through dinner. The young men joined us before half past nine and by ten everyone had gone home. Ashamed, disconcerted by the erudition of the college women who had been discussing Hegel’s antinomies, the Faerie Queen, and La Grande Jatte, I went up to my room to drug myself with typewriter practice.

But because I did not wish to appear ungrateful or incapable of acting as a hostess, I said nothing when Miss Pride planned another of these exhausting fiascos. And since she was a friend of their families, her recruits rarely failed to accept her invitations, usually issued over the telephone to their mothers. Certain that she had pleased me and furthered my interests, she remarked once to the Admiral who had inquired how I put in my time, “Why, she keeps a regular salon to which only the cream of the intelligentsia is bidden. I don’t stay among them, they’re so formidable, so I always arrange to have other fish to fry. I wouldn’t like them to find out what a dunce I am.”

It was difficult to reconcile her selection of my friends with her antipathy to “braininess” for these young people had nothing if they had not that. And if she hoped to launch me on a social career which would not interfere with her other plans for me but would satisfy the natural demands of my youth, she was doomed to failure. They were all too busy, too ambitious, and too learned to seek me out, but it did not seem to occur to Miss Pride that it was strange I never received a return invitation.

I easily divined that the principal reason for her supervision of my social life was that she wished to distract me from thinking about Philip. She was not, of course, protecting me from disappointment but was looking out for Hopestill’s interests, or rather, for the interests she devoutly desired the girl to have. I had heard from the Countess that the doctor had the reputation of being not only fickle but catholic in his love affairs, and just the year before had been all but engaged to a nurse from Nova Scotia in the Salem hospital whom he had boldly introduced in Boston even though she had, said the Countess, “the table manners of a Bavarian, the opinions of a barbarian, and the looks of a Paphian.” It was true that she had been only a passing fancy and as soon as he had broken with her, Philip had fallen in love with Hope all over again as he had done each time he had strayed away. Just as he had often threatened to abandon medicine and become an astronomer or a carpenter or a Trappist monk but always returned to his profession with renewed enthusiasm, so he had invariably come back to Hope after an excursion in another quarter. While it was Miss Pride’s belief (relayed to me by the Countess who did not dream, of course, that I had more than the merest interest in the doctor) that he would never marry unless he married her niece, she viewed with trepidation any symptoms in him of infatuation with another girl.

Although she did not mention his name to me and made no comment on the incident at the Countess’, her campaign was perfectly apparent. She made a point of never inviting Philip to her house unless Hopestill was there, of always going to the Countess’ when he was my partner and on such occasions of taking me home in her own car, of taking any telephone messages from him to me, even though I was at home, on the pretext that I was busy studying my bookkeeping or my shorthand. He, on his part, was delighted to have a chance to tease her and all during the spring telephoned me almost every day, requesting her to tell me that he would meet me “as usual” at the Lincolnshire or that he would pick me up the following day at Mrs. Hinkel’s. The messages were never delivered and he, of course, had not meant them seriously, but Miss Pride arranged to have me run an errand at the hour he had named and, in order to make sure that I was obeying her, telephoned my destination to give me a further commission.

I could have told her that her precautions were needless. We did meet surreptitiously but it was only their secrecy that made our evenings together more entertaining than those I spent with Miss Pride’s academicians. We met once every two weeks in the Union Oyster House where, in an atmosphere of sawdust and the acrid rot of crustaceans’ shells, Philip was by turns courtly and brusque, but neither the one nor the other to any degree that would have told me how he thought of me. Nor did I, indeed, know how I thought of him. It was as if both of us were engaged in a pursuit of phantoms. We parted formally at the door of Miss Pride’s house, but in our short lingering there was a mutual inquiry as if we had seen for an instant that which we desired but which distrust immediately obliterated. We were like blind men who, through some somatic perspicacity, can accurately judge spatial relationships and sense the presence of someone in the room but cannot, without the assistance of their hearing or their touch, know who it is. So we were at once the blind men and were the coy creatures who would not speak and would not offer up their faces or their hands for the expert, identifying touch. Or we were amateurs after nightfall in a terrain we did not know, hearing the hounds bay their triumph; to our untrained ears the sound of these fanatics might come from any direction, and we stumbled, parting company, running this way and that, encouraged by the nearness of the sound which in the next moment was miles away. At last we were to find the captive in its dog-rimmed tree, the coon peering suddenly with its owlish eyes, the clever possom faking sleep; we had known this was the quarry, this quaint and useless beast, but we were disappointed, resented our fatigue and chill, wondered why hunters and dogs night after night returned to the woods for the absurd quest. But going back the way we came, we did not voice our foolish grief, merely commented on the sky and its omens for the next day’s weather.

I would afterwards lie sleepless for hours in the double envelope of darkness and quiet. Sometimes my thoughts wandered to other things, but they returned to what most tantalized them, bringing back from the impersonal world, prosaic crusts by which to compare their banquet. I would consider Miss Pride, asleep on the floor below me, as stark as an effigy while Mercy, whom I had never seen, toured the room on considerately noiseless feet. Or I stared at the grove of sharp iron spikes outside my window to keep the pigeons away, like a full quiver in the arc light. Hearing the impatient whistle of a train about to depart, I thought of how, if it were leaving from the North Station, it would pass by Walden Pond and Concord. If it were leaving from the South Station, it would go towards New York, that unimaginable foreign country from which Hopestill dutifully returned each week-end. And I would ponder her in whom there was at work a ferment which neither Philip nor I could analyze. It was more, he said, than a love affair. She would not come back to Boston so faithfully every Friday afternoon if it were only that. Her whole life there was a secret she guarded so jealously that she had refused even to list her address in the Social Register. She gave no apparent signs of restlessness. We continued to go to Concord to ride and she as adroitly tortured the McAllister ladies as she had always done. The altercations between her and her aunt were a little more frequent but not much fiercer. But I knew, from our vague and slightly drunken conversations on Friday nights and from our sparse talk on the train back from Concord that she was on bad terms with herself. For there was no longer the camaraderie between us which had allowed us to gossip, to communicate on the same level. The Countess’ musical afternoons did not amuse her, nor did she welcome any of my observations on her aunt’s friends which heretofore she had relished, saying, “It takes an outlander to trap us alive.” We talked now and again of a book, or in a desultory way Hope would tell me of an encounter in a Harlem night-club. There was thus apparently no more between us than between two people whiling away an hour in a train by means of a spotty conversation. At the same time, there was a bond of sorts between us which, although she did not know it, went back to the day when I, a little girl, had first learned that she lived in this house. Sometimes, against my will, my eyes were drawn to the portrait of her as a child. Once, seeing my contemplation of its delicate and sentimental color, she said, “I was really a nasty little proposition although I look so winsome there. But what child wouldn’t be nasty who grew up in this place?”

I was infected both by Hopestill’s furtive trouble and by Philip’s capriciousness and had it not been for Miss Pride’s reliably unchanging manner, would have probably given way to a dangerous dissatisfaction. She, I was sure, had no idea that my life did not satisfy me in every particular. She herself was so pleased with my progress that she invited me to live with her again the following year. Indeed, she declared, she hoped I would take up permanent residence on Pinckney Street. She regretted that she could not offer me her hospitality for the summer, but could instead provide me with a splendid opportunity to put into practice my stenographic training. I was to work in her soap factory in Cambridge, an arrangement which everyone except myself regarded with the greatest enthusiasm. The plan was generally thought to be my own idea and Miss Pride would say to her friends, “Sonie is the cleverest person here. No summer stupor for her: she has got herself a job, mind you, and while the rest of us are loafing, she will be earning money.” Only the Admiral expressed doubts. “Why, child,” he said, “won’t you be lonesome?”

I was extremely lonesome. Philip had gone back to Chichester, and all the people I had met at Miss Pride’s or at the Countess’ had left for the Cape or the North Shore. It was too hot to read. My furnished bedroom on Kirkland Street was under the roof and the air was motionless all night. I lay naked on the bare floor, the sweat tickling my legs and back like flies’ feet and, stupefied, I thought of nothing. It was, in this season, almost a pleasure to visit my mother. Although the trip was complicated, including three stages, by bus, by subway, and again by bus, I made it with a sort of martyred delight. As I sat in the crowded subway train, nudged by people carrying fading flowers and boxes of cake to their Sunday hostesses, or fanning their streaming faces with the Boston Globe, or swaying half asleep from the heat, I was more at ease than I had ever been in Miss Pride’s house. At ease, even though at the end of the torpid journey there was neither rest nor entertainment, but the disinfected madhouse where I sat with Mamma, bored, sleepy but required to be on my guard each moment.

On the few unseasonable evenings when a languid breeze stirred the papers on my writing table and my pores stopped gushing, I wrote letters to Philip and to Hopestill and to Miss Pride, but only the last did I ever mail. On the way home from the letter box, I would stop and buy a bottle of sherry and once again in my characterless room would steep myself in the harsh, unpalatable wine and stare gloomily at the crabbed, complaining lines I had written to the people I could not fathom, yet could not ignore.

The second autumn in Boston differed from the first only in that we had begun the memoirs. We worked each morning except Sunday from the time our consultation with the servants ended until luncheon was announced, but for all our diligence we proceeded at such a snail’s pace that I saw we had before us a labor of many years, and I wondered if the final product would be worth it. For Miss Pride, shrewd, witty, and fluent in conversation, was inarticulate when she began to write. The juvenility of her diction and the crudity of her syntax surprised me, for her few letters to me had been as elegant as her speech. After floundering for some months with no success, we at last hit upon a plan. She would write me a letter, very carefully in the style of Horace Walpole, of whom she was an assiduous student, which begged me to set down in “sound English” the anecdote which she then wrote out in her tumid language. As her calligraphy was obscure (not intentionally, as the Countess von Happel’s was, but because she wrote in the heat of passion), it often took me a full morning to decipher a single sentence and in a short time my desk bore a formidable sheaf of manuscript which I had not transcribed or edited. Thus, all morning we worked facing one another at two long desks which had been pushed together.

Hopestill came home less often than she had done the year before and when she did come, I rarely saw her. We discontinued our evenings in her room and our rides in Concord. She was apparently so uninterested in anyone in Boston that she preferred her own society and during her visits kept to her room, emerging only for meals. Gradually she became for me no more than a ghost, one belonging in a way to Chichester, and I was free at last of any envy of her. Her clothes, if they were more spectacular, were no more expensive than mine; if I did not have Philip McAllister’s whole heart, as she had had it at various times in her life, I had his constant companionship which even Miss Pride had been forced to recognize and tolerate. In my good fortune, I could afford to pity her for her misanthropy, and for the solitude in which she inexplicably had immersed herself. It was therefore the more startling that we again came together without warning and with most savage intimacy.

Philip had not waited even long enough for a cup of tea, but had only come to arrange to call for me at dinner-time. We were going later to the Countess’. The business had been transacted within earshot of Miss Pride intentionally, and while she made no alternative suggestion, she said with great displeasure, “I hoped you would have dinner with me. Now I shall be all alone.” Philip gave her a smile. “She needs a change of air every now and again, you know.”

The younger Mrs. McAllister had been Christmas shopping and declared when she came in that the only thing which had relieved the tedium of the task was the prospect of a “reviving chat with Lucy Pride.” She had, however, after a perfunctory, albeit effusive, salutation to her hostess, immediately sought out Amy Brooks and the two of them had sat, heads together, on the sofa where Amy was in the habit of holding court for Mr. James and Mr. Pingrey. Philip paid his brief compliments to his mother and left the room. I went to the window and saw him for a moment hesitating before he went down the street. I was surprised to see that he was wearing a bowler today and that he carried a stick, for usually his dress was of the most casual. I experienced a moment of peculiar distaste for him as I watched his grotesquely military bearing in which, it seemed to me, I had sensed a new element.

Half an hour after he had gone, Hopestill made an entrance into the drawing-room, pausing as she had done the first time I saw her, at the tulip wood commode to reconnoiter and to determine which of the guests after her aunt deserved her first greeting. She was dressed in green moiré, the severity of which did not check her flaming beauty but struggled with it in a magnificent combat, so that her sudden appearance in the doorway, unexpected, was like a chivalric, plangent war brought to our quiet gathering.

“I know,” laughed her niece. “It was to be a surprise, Auntie. You’re glad, I trust?”

Because she had never before “surprised” her aunt with a visit, the old lady looked questioningly at her, but smiled and said, “Delighted.”

When she had kissed Miss Pride and the Admiral, Hopestill crossed the room to Philip’s mother who, on seeing her, cried out, “Oh, how glad I am I dropped in today! I never dreamed you’d be here. Philip will be wild when he knows he missed you. He just this minute left.”

“It’s nice of you to say that he’ll be ‘wild,’ Mrs. McAllister. But since Amy was here I imagine he had quite a full enough afternoon without me.”

Mrs. McAllister bit her lip in vexation. Philip had only nodded to Amy. Moreover, Amy had dropped a few remarks that had intimated at a romantic attachment to Edward Pingrey. I had heard Mrs. McAllister say, “But, Amy, he’s not really your sort of person, do you think so? I’m extremely taken with Edward, as we all are, but he has never really belonged to your set . . . to yours and Philip’s, that is.” Amy ingenuously replied, “Why, Philip and I don’t belong to the same set at all. I believe he thinks I’m unconventional.” Her giggles commenced and drowned out the older woman’s next speech.

Now, unwittingly nettling Mrs. McAllister, she said to Hopestill, “He snubbed me completely. He only came to make a rendezvous with Sonie.”

“Ah,” said Hope, glancing in my direction. But she turned again to her cousin. “I like your dress, Amy.” She could not suppress a smile for Amy, who had no judgment about clothes, was wearing bright red wool, most unbecoming to her colorless face to which she had clumsily applied orange lip rouge and excessive mascara.

“It’s terribly red, isn’t it?” cried Amy, beside herself with her strange nervousness. “Edward likes it! Hope! I have read Freud since I saw you last!”

Hopestill smiled condescendingly and turned to Philip’s mother. “I hope your mother will still let me dress at her house.”

“Well, you know you’re always welcome, my dear. You haven’t changed your mind about coming to my house instead? But perhaps you wouldn’t like to feel indebted to Philip for I should give you his old playroom and he’s most sentimental about it. I don’t blame you: I shouldn’t like to owe that young man a thing. Tell me truthfully, Hope, don’t you think he has a heartless nature?”

“Indeed I do,” replied the girl. “And that’s the reason we’ve always got on so famously, for I’m heartless too.”

Hopestill, outraged because Mrs. McAllister had raised her voice so that everyone in the room could hear her, took her leave but not before she had said icily, “It’s kind of you to compliment me so, but I’m bound to disappoint you if you really think I’m warm-hearted.”

They embraced tenderly and the older woman said, “You could never disappoint me, Hopestill Mather.”

I had been on the point of going upstairs for I had a few letters to type out for Miss Pride, but Hopestill intercepted me and taking me by the arm, led me back to the love-seat in the bay window. As we sat down, I saw that she was shockingly altered from the last time she had been here: the violet glades were deep beneath her glaring eyes and as deep were the new hollows in her pale cheeks which had lost their luster and had the gray opacity of fatigue. And as she talked, hysteria expanded her nostrils and shook her lips.

“I’ll telephone him then. I’m awfully anxious to see him. I don’t suppose he told you what his plans were for the evening?”

“Why, yes. I’m having dinner with him and afterwards we’re going to the Countess’.”

She raised her eyebrows in a faked surprise. “Oh! I didn’t know you actually dined with him.”

She repeated, “I didn’t know you actually dined with him. But it’s of no importance. I dare say he didn’t know I was coming on today. I wrote but perhaps the letter was delayed. I should have wired.”

“You wrote?” My alarmed question was involuntary. Then, flustered by her lofty imperturbability, I said, “I’ve got some letters to go off. I’d better go up now.”

I rose and started across the room as Hopestill went to sit beside Admiral Nephews. Miss Pride, who had left the room just after her niece arrived, was returning and I confronted her in the hall. “I trust you’re going back to the letters. They’re urgent and must go off tonight by air.” I promised that I would not fail to get them in the post and moved past her. “One thing more, Sonie,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. “I cannot condone—and I certainly cannot overlook—your behavior with Dr. McAllister. Two people remarked to me today that you seemed to be flirting with him. For your sake, I denied the accusation though I regret to say that in doing so I was also denying the evidence my eyes furnished me. I speak only for your own good, believe me, Sonie. I don’t blame you. What was more natural than for you to go to Berthe von Happel’s little parties with him? But it shouldn’t have gone beyond that, my dear. It’s been imprudent of Philip to encourage you in this infatuation. If I had been he and saw what was coming over you, I would have left you strictly alone. Why, Sonie, you’re too sensible a girl to hitch your wagon to a star like that. Surely you must have heard what sort of person he is—one can’t count the girls he’s trifled with.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about me, Miss Pride,” I told her. “I have my feet on the ground.”

“That’s the way to talk! I knew you had good sense. Well, we all must take our foolish holidays, mustn’t we? But now, since you know people have talked—unjustly I do believe—you’ll take care not to let them talk again, won’t you? Run along now and don’t forget the letters. Isn’t it nice that Hopestill came back just in time?”

“Why, in time for Berthe’s party. This is her most elaborate one of the year.”

It was still early when I went to Hopestill’s room, but she was already dressed and was seated before her fire engaged in wrapping a Christmas present. Her small sitting-room was confused with suitcases and unopened parcels and in the window stood a locked wardrobe trunk. “As you see,” she said, following my eyes, “I’ve come back for good. When I’ve tied this knot, let’s have a glass of sherry. Can you believe it, I had the fortitude to take a bottle of Aunt Lucy’s private stock.” I said I would have none. “Oh, do!” She dropped her package and took hold of my wrist, digging her enameled talons into my skin, as if my abstention from the stolen sherry threatened a catastrophe. She filled two glasses and gave me one. “Here, take it. You’ve never tasted anything like it.”

She took a sip from her glass and picking up the fallen ribbon and the shears, turned to her work again. “Sonie,” she said, “would you mind awfully if I went to dinner tonight with Philip?”

“Well, she didn’t. It was my own idea. I knew you wouldn’t mind and you don’t, do you? Did he by any chance,” she said, looking up from her package, “send you those camellias you’re wearing?”

I said he had. “They’re lovely on your dress and what a lovely dress it is, too.” I could not return her smile. She went on matter-of-factly, “Look here, Sonie, you’re not in love with him, are you? Because if you are, I’m devilishly sorry. I’m afraid I rather put ideas in your head.”

“Sonie, I simply couldn’t stick New York any longer!” she burst out. “I don’t think I’ll ever leave Boston again. It’s more than flesh can bear to be separated from the only thing in the world one gives a tinker’s damn about.”

“You know perfectly well I mean Philip.” She gave me a quick, bright smile intended to tell me that I was the first to be let in on her secret. “By the way, would you rather have your Christmas present now or wait? You know this year, for the first time in my life, I’m actually looking forward to Aunt Lucy’s Christmas tree even though there is something really revolting about the way she hauls the servants up and gives them ridiculous presents. Do you know that once she gave Ethel two decks of cards in a monogrammed leather case for Whist parties?”

Wishing to have these pointless preliminaries finished, I said, “I’d like to have my present now.”

“Oh, darling! How impossible of me! I just remembered it won’t be here until tomorrow. It’s a phonograph and several albums of records.”

I was touched by her generosity and when I thanked her, she said, “After all, it was the least I could do, wasn’t it?” The remark erased the kindness from her gift, told me with its frank interrogation that it was even less than solace but was the payment of a bribe the necessity of which she had anticipated, even though she had declared a little while before that she was not aware I dined with Philip. Hearing then her condescending negotiations, I was like the child who is told that he may not go to the picnic but for his supper may have a cream-puff. In his grief he believes he is offered a choice and cries, “But I don’t want a cream-puff!” and cannot believe that his franchise is specious, nor can he persuade the governor of the nursery that while he likes cream-puffs and any other night would welcome them for supper, this is not the night; he wants only the hard-boiled eggs and the cold chicken that are to be on the menu of the picnic. I did not want the phonograph although for several months I had been wishing for one, and while I could not say, like the disappointed child, that I did not, I could, like him, point out certain drawbacks in the gift. The child would say, “I don’t want a cream-puff and it’s silly because nurse told me we were having steamed pudding for supper and we can’t have both and I think they’re horrid anyway,” and I said, “But I wish you hadn’t bought me any records because our taste is probably not the same at all.”

“Oh, Sonie, I’m sorry!” I had really distressed her and thought I even saw signs of tears in her exhausted eyes. She said, “I’ve tried so hard!” and thinking that she meant she had tried so hard to please me and my ingratitude was more than she could bear, I quickly said, “Oh, don’t! I’ve really longed for a phonograph, and I’ve no doubt the records can be exchanged if I don’t like them.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant I had tried so hard in other ways. Well, it was all lost a long time ago and it’s useless to try to regain it. I mean my balance was lost, my integrity, whatever it is in the name of God that keeps one together.”

She poured herself another glass of sherry. “Do you want to hear an ugly yarn?” she said. “I haven’t been ‘studying’ in New York at all, as Auntie knew and everyone must have suspected. I was going to a psycho-analyst and paying out fifteen dollars an hour for his nasty mumbo-jumbo. He had shaded lamps and old copies of the New Yorker and big divans in his waiting room where we all sat, so scornful of one another, pretending, every damned one of us, that we weren’t there on business but had just come to pay a social call or had just dropped in to rest our feet. He had two Siamese cats that I grew to hate so violently that the doctor declared I had a cat complex, and he was beside himself with triumph when I volunteered, merely to pass the time, that Aunt Lucy had a cat that she kept locked up in her bedroom. He really said ‘Eureka!’ as though the whole problem were settled and it would only be a matter of minutes to find the cure. It’s exactly like a dream and I can’t really believe that he advised me that day to go out and buy a cat, not, mind you, a Siamese but a Persian tortoise shell like Mercy although I kept telling him that I had no objection to Mercy and it was his own wretched animals that I detested. He said I had come to substitute himself for my aunt! I kept going back because it quickly became a habit and at the same time I was doing just the same things I’d always done before because now I had confessed my sins they didn’t seem very bad. He told me I wasn’t co-operating and I got the notion that I was getting by with something because I was deceiving him the way I used to deceive the teachers at school and then Aunt Lucy and I enjoyed it all the more with him because he was powerless. I took the keenest pleasure in doing all the things I pretended I hated. His name was Dr. Ragsdale and I would tell him my dreams in which it was changed to ‘Dr. Ratsbane.’ He was pigeon-breasted and so evil I always knew he was homosexual and alcoholic as well as clinically insane.”

“Why, indeed? I kept thinking, I suppose, that I’d develop such a horror of my nature and the way he mauled it that I would at last be able to change. But I didn’t. And so I have come back to Boston. Here maybe I can. There’s probably a devil in me, one straight from hell like those in the Salem witches my ancestors used to burn.”

She was sincere. A silence followed her words in which that evil she believed in and urged me to believe in was like a third person in the room; or it was like an innovation in the furnishings which was felt but not immediately perceived. I remembered, in that quiet, a series of small incidents which had puzzled me but which I had put out of my mind: once, the year before, when we were on our friendliest terms, she had brought me a present of a chartreuse evening gown which she had bought for herself and had afterwards discovered was too large. Chartreuse was a color I could not possibly wear as there were tints in my skin inimical to any variations of green or yellow, and since Hopestill and I had discussed this very misfortune sometime before when we had been shopping, I was naturally surprised at her gift. But in order to please her I put it on and went down to the sitting-room. Hopestill and her aunt were both there. “For heaven’s sake!” cried Miss Pride. “Where did you get that frightful dress, child? You’re the color of bile! Run back up this minute and change to that pretty blue of yours.” “Yes, do, Sonie,” agreed Hopestill, “it’s awful.” I was glad enough to change and went out, but stopping in the hall a minute to glance over a pile of letters I had put on the table to make sure they were all stamped, I chanced to hear Hopestill say, “I can’t think what got into me when I bought it for her. I was so proud of myself to remember her size, but imagine my forgetting that she couldn’t wear that color,” so that I knew she had not bought it for herself as she had told me. Another time, she had told me that she wanted me to meet a very distinguished cousin of hers who had married an Oxford don and was visiting for a few weeks in Milton. She said she had arranged a small dinner party and particularly wanted me to come because she thought I would find Lady So and So very amusing. And yet, when the day arrived and I warned her that I might be a few minutes late as I had to run an errand for Miss Pride in Cambridge, she said, “As a matter of fact, Sonie, Aunt Lucy asked me to tell you to stay at the Cock Horse for dinner and she’ll send Mac around for you at nine. We’re having a little dinner party for a cousin of mine who’s a great bore and a stickler for family and that kind of thing.”

Her malice was conscious, but its genesis was abrupt and unplanned, or seemed to be, though actually it must have been calculated painstakingly in the craters of her subconscious mind, so that probably she had intended to buy the dress for herself but a sudden impulse had made her select my size rather than her own and she had forgotten, in her guilt, the story she had told me and had told her aunt quite another. Now, having discovered the diathesis predisposing her to these brutalities I looked upon her with detachment, and thinking that what she wanted tonight was not to be with Philip but to spoil my evening (a desire which came from the same mischief that had prompted her to give me the dress), I resolved to keep my appointment with him.

Her mood had changed from one of restive worry to a sort of mild elation. She stretched out full length before the fire, her hair like the beams of a monstrance as it lay gleaming on the green carpet. The arc of her wide turquoise velvet skirt was broken by her small feet shod in gold dancing slippers. About her throat she wore a tightly plaited gold chain from which depended a scarabeus fluted with lapis lazuli. We were so still we heard Miss Pride moving about her room on the floor below us.

I stood up. “You know I didn’t. But if you insist on it, take his flowers.” As I unpinned them, I pricked my finger and I thought how ruinous and beautiful this jewel of blood would be if it were to drop and glisten on her blue-green skirt.

She received the camellias, but as she pinned them to her shoulder, a shudder streamed from her face to her frivolous feet. “I wonder if he . . .”

“If when he bought them he touched them with his hands. Oh, God!” She covered her face with her fingers, but her eyes were visible through the interstices. She stared up at me with a plea which, being unable to fathom, I could not grant. But as I turned to go, leaving the issue constructed between us like a barrier with no purpose, the girl’s seemingly diverse moods which she had addressed to me since our first words in the drawing-room at tea time now appeared as an unbroken concatenation, and I was enlightened as I saw the uniformity of her whims. I divined, through an intuition which had never been exercised in me before, either because of a physical immaturity or because of the want of circumstances, that there was a sole exigency that could drive her to this corner where, for all her insolence, she was terrified. And as I realized that not the satanic particles but the organic chemistry of her composition had led her to this replacement of myself for the evening (a replacement she was determined, I now knew, to make permanent), I was ready to withdraw any claims I might have had since her need was so much greater than my own. My delay at the door, occasioned by this certain understanding, may have communicated its derivation to her, although she said, to my surprise (for in this instant after I realized that my hand had been half a minute on the door knob, I almost expected her to confirm my suspicions, to admit frankly that she was pregnant), “Take back the flowers and go to dinner with him. I will see you all at Berthe’s.” I had not fully turned around and I envisaged the flowers, their magenta petals protecting the golden filaments of the core, and as I went back to retrieve them (though I no longer wanted them, for by their exchange of hands they had been bruised and their significance had been polluted) my eyes traversed the window where, by arc light from Louisburg Square, the cold December snow was falling, and I remembered, as we remember comfort when the crisis of our pain descends and hints of our recovery are given us, that Philip had told me once that camellias bloomed in midwinter in New Orleans.

The single peal, three flights down, preceded a moment the six bells struck by the nautical clock on Hopestill’s mantel. “It’s Philip,” I said, as I bent over to take the flowers. My utterance of his Christian name, upon the heels of my recollection of his report that camellias bloomed this time of year in the south (for, unable to visualize such a phenomenon, I had merely thought the words, Philip said . . .) imparted to my flesh an inchoate, sensual delight, similar as I perceived to that I had experienced when, identifying my own body with Hopestill’s to make my diagnosis of her altered nature, my comprehension had not been established by logic but by the completion of my own ripening. Hopestill still lay before the fire in her strategic immobility. It was strategic because she appeared transfixed by an invisible pinion to the floor as if, like the possum or the dung-beetle playing dead, she would come to life at once upon my departure. Her eyes, apparently shut, took in each motion it was necessary for me to make to unpin the flowers from her shoulder and, glancing at the bits of shining eyeball, visible through her long, sparse auburn lashes and seeing once in that brief space of my perusal, the gold-flecked iris that enshrined the eye’s soul, I knew myself to be in the presence of desperation so rarefied at this climax reared up by the signal at the outer door that it resembled lethargy. And simultaneously, I knew that no one else would see what I had seen and that she would go scot-free. Although at this point in her there was ambush and a cause for it, both would be obliterated; the sins would be exorcised not by the psycho-analyst but by concealing custom.

When I had left her and had stepped into the corridor, the sensation that summarized the scene in Hopestill’s sitting-room was not one of anger or indignation, had nothing in it more unfavorable to her than my old and now enfeebled antipathy to the child in the Barstow dining-room. I directed the movement of my body to partake of the grace of my dinner dress, desiring, as though Miss Pride’s dim hallway were lined with spectators, my organism to proclaim through its flattering draperies that the force inspiring me was one of fleshly love, akin to the passion that had undone Hopestill and with devoted obstinacy still clung to her in her dilemma. The love I felt, which like a rapid poison circulated throughout me, had no object, and until I was on the last flight of stairs from the top of which I saw Philip’s hat and gloves on the vestibule table, my desire did not focus, for until then, the elusive lover I had tried to construct was that unnamed, unacknowledged man whose impregnation of Hopestill was also an exegesis of my own changing self. Then, attaching my attention to a well-known object, for the space of ten seconds, I was determined to finish with him what I had so indecisively begun. But the moment my desire materialized, it vanished; the shame that recalled me to my usual timidity was incommensurate with its cause: at the same time that I took in the doctor’s bowler and the gray suède gloves, I heard Miss Pride’s voice through the closed door of her bedroom: “You may go now, Ethel. I am ready to undress.” The direction, which was probably superfluous to the well-trained maid who knew by heart her mistress’s habits, fell upon my ear like an injunction repeated to herself by a nun, and I could no more imagine Miss Pride in the deshabille she painstakingly kept for the eyes only of her mirrors, than I could have imagined a Mother Superior in her nightdress. I took no pleasure now in the décolletage of my new frock, and thought it would be improved by the addition of a shawl thrown about my shoulders. But the atavistic reaction was not complete as it had been formerly, when I was a child and had loathed my mother for those qualities I had now discovered in myself. For I had gone too far, by becoming myself a protagonist, to believe blindly any longer that Miss Pride’s was the ideal pattern: there was, in the tone of her voice, cold and neutral, a suggestion of ingrown, conceited lewdness which, having no sexuality to modify, advertised the secret nudity of the old, arid carcass.

The doctor had been shown into the library where he stood inaudibly conversing with a large young man, shaped like an athlete, but one whose muscles had relaxed already and beneath whose chin a soft second growth had begun. They turned to greet me and Dr. McAllister introduced me to his friend, Frank Whitney. The doctor was nervous and would not sit down. He said, “I’ve just lost my first patient and if there’s anything here besides Grandfather Pride’s port, I’d like to resort to the traditional sedative. Do you keep any whiskey here?” We did. I brought out a decanter of whiskey and a tumbler. Philip poured the glass three-quarters full. “I can blame only myself, although some kind-hearted person said the x-ray reading had been at fault. It was a skull-fracture and I advised against operating.” He drank half the whiskey and then, pausing, with the glass still in his hand, he said, “How stupid! I poured out three times as much as I wanted,” yet his hand remained suspended, clasping the tumbler and I knew that he wanted the rest of it, indeed, probably wanted another double portion, but that his will denied it to him.

“Hopestill is here,” I said. The response on his face to my announcement was a compressed version of what I had seen on the first afternoon I met her when he raised his hand and touched her hair. But his look was not one of surprise and I wondered again what she had written him.

“That’s convenient,” he said. “Frank decided at the last minute to come along. We can all go together. By the way, some friends of Hope’s rang me up a little while ago and said they were stopping by here . . . perhaps we can offer them a drink, what do you say?”

“Oh, yes, I have no doubt we can,” I replied. “She’s very anxious to see you, Philip.”

Hopestill entered the room. The animal that had matured in Philip’s disciplined person, despite the herculean efforts of his Puritan will, strained towards its meeting with that other specimen of the same genus that I had seen rioting in the cold prison of the girl recumbent before her hearth. I turned away as he went to greet her and discovered Frank Whitney’s dreamy brown eyes regarding me with wonder. I had picked up Philip’s half-emptied glass and downed it. “Do you often do that?” inquired the young man. “I mean, drink that much whiskey neat?”

Philip was telling Hopestill that her friends were coming here. “The person who telephoned me was named Morgan,” he said.

“Oh, yes, of course. I know him,” replied Hopestill. “He’s from Long Island. From a branch of the family famous for its lack of fame. Quite a barbarian he is, but I’m rather fond of him.”

“Morgan?” said Mr. Whitney as if it were a name he had heard in some unsavory connection. “I don’t know any Morgans.” He uttered it as an accusatory epithet, as if its etymology had vested the name with respectability but its root meaning glared forth in the pronunciation; it was as if he had said, “A rum runner? I don’t know any rum runners.”

The door-bell rang, bringing us, in a moment, Mr. Morgan and a couple who were introduced with a great deal of laughter as the Cabots, the reason for the hilarity being that their name was really Babbitt. Mr. Babbitt who, because of an unfortunate obtrusion of his mouth, resembled an animal that rhymed with both Cabot and Babbitt (I pointed this out to Frank Whitney later and he said gravely, “That’s not our kind of joke.”), came up to me as if we had known one another all our lives and said, “Where’s the booze, honey?”

“The drinks are coming now,” I said. Ethel had brought in glasses and ice at Hope’s order.

“That’s dandy. Are you going to Berthe von Happel’s shindig?” I replied that I was and remarked that I was sure it would be a very lavish party since the Countess had dispensed with the dinner party and had expended all her efforts on the midnight supper.

“Oh, she’ll give us our money’s worth tonight, bless her royal heart. I nipped in this afternoon for five minutes to see if I could lend a hand, and had a look into that gorgeous drawing-room of hers. Would you believe it, she has a Christmas tree—a tannenbaum, as she insists—reaching to the ceiling, an absolute smack in Louis Quinze’s face. And she has poinsettias in green tubs all over the house, for all the world like a department store.”

“She’s really appalling,” said his wife, “but it’s impossible not to adore her.”

This was a brazen untruth, but Hopestill, Philip, and Frank Whitney all enthusiastically seconded it. The irony of the expressions, “Isn’t that absolutely the case!” “I love her parties, particularly her Christmas parties,” and “She’s a jewel, I’m head over heels in love with Berthe!” was so deeply embedded that had I not known that the authors of these praises actually despised the Countess, I should have thought them a cult convening to eulogize a high priestess. Thus, when they described her drawing-room to someone who had never seen it, they appeared to find it enchanting, and it was only the initiated who knew that some such statement as “She has two spurious Watteaus which are so charming one doesn’t mind their being frauds,” was actually inspired by the most savage spitefulness. The stranger, whose ear missed the note of contempt, at once admired the Bostonians for their defense of the Countess and felt little interest in the house itself, believing the word “charming” had been used out of simple generosity.

“Do you suppose Kalenkoff will be there?” asked Mr. Babbitt and the whole room laughed. Accustomed to their own habits of inbreeding and holding the common notion that royalty east of Austria was worthless because it was so abundant, these American aristocrats seemed to frequent the Louis Quinze salon chiefly for the purpose of snubbing its titled habitués. An obscure professor of physics from the University of Paris fared better at their hands than an arch-duke, and the dashing Baron Kalenkoff was invited nowhere while a wealthy British manufacturer of photographic equipment had a standing invitation to the best houses and clubs. They were so perversely American, so vehemently uninterested in any culture but that which their ancestors had found acceptable that they even went out of their way to offend the Countess’ friends by their intentionally inaccurate pronunciations of German place names or their smug misconstruction of political philosophy or even, though this was regarded as démodé, by bragging of the excellence of the American sanitary system. On the one Saturday the year before when the Admiral had put in an appearance, he had said to Baron Kalenkoff, “Is it true, mate, that you Russian chaps sleep with dogs in your bunks?” The Baron flashed him a friendly smile. “It is customary,” he said. “And when our guests are shown to their rooms they do not find detective novels and magazines on the night table to amuse them but they find the master’s best dog in the bed. If the guest is any kind of gentleman, he will refuse this extravagant kindness and will insist that he be given the second best dog. You may be sure, sir, that if he does not hesitate to climb into bed with his host’s prize wolfhound, he will never be asked again.” The Admiral was flabbergasted by this leg-pull and moved away, remarking gruffly to Mrs. Frothingham who quite agreed with him, “Those Russians have no sense of humor.”

Mr. Morgan alone did not join in the laughter and I surmised that he did not know the Countess. He had said nothing after the introductions and I quite erroneously thought that he was ill at ease. But when the laughter had subsided, he stepped forward shakily and said, “Don’t you know I’m to be congratulated?” Mr. Babbitt then informed us that Mr. Morgan was celebrating his coming into a vast fortune through the death of his grandmother. To my astonishment, I heard Philip propose a toast.

“Thank you, thank you,” said the heir, bowing at his stocky waist. “Somebody is missing from this conference, isn’t somebody? It looks like a damned little conference, and what is this place we’re holding it in? The Atheneum?”

“The missing person,” said Mr. Babbitt, familiarly nudging me with his elbow, “beg pardon, the missing link is Miss Nanny Brewster whom you left in the ladies’ retiring room at the Ritz bar.”

“Nanny Brewster?” cried Hopestill shrilly. “What do you mean by bringing that street-walker to my house?”

Morgan patted her shoulder and said soothingly, “There, there, she isn’t in the Atheneum. Didn’t you hear John say she was in the W.C.?”

Frank Whitney abruptly presented his back to the company, whispering to me, “I remember him now,” and began to read the titles of a section of books on Far Eastern studies. In a moment I joined him, preferring his pastime to the discussion of Miss Brewster’s whereabouts, but not before Mr. Babbitt murmured to me with a moist laugh, “I don’t know which one of them is getting the run-around.” We were some distance from the others, Mr. Whitney and I, when he growled, “Bad blood is the rule with those Long Islanders. How can Hope stomach a buffoon like Harry Morgan?” And then, because Mr. Babbitt seemed to be approaching us again, he said, taking a book down, “Here’s a funny thing, a Japanese novel translated into German. I call that too much of a good thing.” Then when we saw that we were to be left alone since Mr. Babbitt was joining his friends, Frank Whitney told me about Morgan.

Mr. Harry Morgan was thirty years old. His equine face was being elongated year by year by the withdrawal of his black hair, and was being softened year by year by good living which the death of his grandmother, happily coinciding with Christmas, was evidently to make even better. We read in the newspapers that scions of famous families have gone to Hollywood to join, usually in a social capacity, the “film colony,” and it is hard to tell, from the impartial journalists, whether the colonists or the immigrant are hereby benefited. Mr. Morgan was such a person, although, if his credentials had been gone into, it would have been found that he was so distantly related to any of the celebrated tycoons whose name he bore that he was no more entitled to a share in their glory than is a person named Shakespeare entitled to the homage of literary people. But it happened that this Mr. Morgan was extremely wealthy and few knew that his money came from the maternal side of his family, named Schumacher, and had been made in a variety of enterprises, including brewing, the manufacture of artificial limbs, razor blades, hooks and eyes, and the breeding of longhorn cattle. But the fact of the money, not its history, was the important thing. It was likely that had his father’s name been Schumacher and he had not used Morgan at all or had used it as a middle name, he would have been as readily accepted in California. However, “the wealthy young Morgan” was a title of more tone than “Schumacher, the artificial limb heir.” At the same time that he maintained an establishment in New York near a café called the Lancelot Club which he owned, he not only frequently visited Sun Valley, Idaho, and while he was about it looked in at his Beverly Hills cottage, but he was also, and had been for years, a student at Harvard College. There was a rumor, Mr. Whitney told me, never confirmed, that he had once made application for a Rhodes’ scholarship.

“I won’t go anywhere if that tart is going along,” Hopestill was saying. “Really, Harry! And you’re drunk.”

“Let’s not anybody quarrel,” he replied amicably. “You had at least five or six drinks too many in the club car, sweetheart, you can’t fool Harry. And how come you weren’t on the train you told me to meet?”

It was as though we had come into a moving picture halfway through and because we did not know the beginning of the plot, could not adjust this scene to the foregoing action. Philip McAllister, standing witness to the intimate tiff, looked suddenly faint. “Excuse me,” he murmured and backed away. For the second time, he told Frank Whitney and me about the skull-fracture case, of whose fatal termination he had learned over the telephone just after he had left our house at tea time. “Let me show you,” he said, taking a pencil and envelope out of his pocket, “what it was in the x-ray reading that deceived me,” and he began to draw a skull, but his hand trembled so, either from his surprise at Hopestill’s almost domestic shrewishness with Morgan whom she had pretended to know only casually, or from a relapse into his earlier shock, that the outline was pinked like a valentine. Above his insistent explanation, I could hear the others talking and I was so intent on their conversation that from the doctor I learned only that the skull might be likened to an egg, which, broken on one side, might break simultaneously on the other, that his patient, struck on the temple had “sustained” an occipital fracture which he had misread as merely the widening of a suture line.

The Babbitts and Mr. Morgan had grouped themselves about the chess-table and seeing the men set up on the board, in readiness for Miss Pride’s Sunday maneuvers, remarked that this was the final touch which proved that they had strayed into a club. To create the illusion that it was a commercial club, they put the board and pieces on the floor and set up in their place the bottle of whiskey to which they freely helped themselves. Hopestill, who had been standing by the fire gazing abstractedly into the spurting logs, joined them when they threatened to put ice down her back if she didn’t, and they sat, the four of them, round the little table, at play, as if they were in a night-club and had grown bored with their surroundings so that they had turned to their own private jokes and gossip for entertainment.

I interrupted the medical monologue. “Listen, Philip,” I said, “this makes me nervous. What if Miss Pride should come in?”

“What if she should? Hope is her own mistress, isn’t she?” he replied touchily.

“But such strange people,” I said. Both young men stared coldly at me and I flushed.

“Helen Babbitt is Hope’s cousin,” said Mr. Whitney solemnly. “I must admit, though, that they are an unattractive lot.”

Philip agreed with a laugh and turning to me forgivingly, he explained that Mrs. Babbitt had been a Miss Brooks and therefore related both to Hopestill and, by marriage, to the Countess, and while no one had ever liked her, for she was a fool and had not worn stockings to her wedding, people forgot this and came to believe that the interloper from New Jersey had made her into what she was. Admiral Nephews had remarked to her, “Madam, thou art mated to a clown,” and ever afterwards it was the universal opinion that Mr. Babbitt had had the weight to drag her down. They came to Boston at Thanksgiving and Christmas to the great suffering of Mrs. Babbitt’s family who were, ironically enough, related in several different ways to the Cabots.

“I suppose it’s natural enough Hope’s taken up with them,” said Whitney. “She’s probably lonely in New York.”

“I would say the contrary,” returned Philip drily. “I’ve concluded that Sonie is right: Miss Lucy would have epilepsy if she came in here now. I’ll see what I can do.” And he called across the room to the group at the chess-table, “Don’t you think it’s time we went on to dinner?”

“Why, doctor, what a childish idea,” said Mr. Morgan, “we are just beginning our apéritif. It’s my party and I name the hour. By the way, doesn’t the Somerset Club serve meals?” He went back to his conversation, dismissing the interruption.

In spite of the objections one might make to his appearance or to his manner, whether one saw at once that he was crude or unscrupulous—for, although dissipation had obscured the sharpness of his face, a certain cunning remained in the eyes which did not look directly into other eyes—or whether he offended one’s intellectual principles, there was about the young millionaire something so magnetic that exposure to the same air he breathed was similar in its effect to a love-philter. I had thought, in the first minutes of my admittedly enraptured regard of him, when my mind, operating simultaneously on two levels saw him on one as irresistible and on the other as repellent, that the sensuality manifest in his face was the forerunner of the corruption into which Dr. Galbraith had helplessly sunk. But presently I revised the prophecy that in twenty years he would be as damned a soul as the old doctor. For while he was sentimental—this was apparent from his slang, that badge by which we recognize the members of an egotistical and tenderly self-indulgent order—he was also shrewd, noncommittal, and even tonight when he was drunk, constantly on guard against involving himself with Hopestill, with Philip, in a sense, with this very room.

There are some people whom we know at first glance will never marry. How we know, I cannot say, but we know as surely as we know that other people have taken a dislike to us at the moment of our presentation to them. Harry Morgan was such a man. What appealed then so strongly to me that it was only with an effort of will that I was able to look away from him was the challenge flung down by his self-sufficiency, which could not but rouse in any woman the desire to conquer him, and I felt a revival of that light-headedness—anticipatory, perhaps, it had been—in which I had descended the top two flights of stairs.

Hopestill, handing him a pair of ice-tongs, said something we could not hear and he replied, whispering in her ear as he put an assured arm about her shoulders. She lingered beside him the briefest time and then moved away. There was a look of outrage on her face, but not that he had been familiar amongst strangers, rather that he had with such facility, such untroubled certainty of where he stood with her, communicated to all of us: “I can take you or leave you alone,” for his gesture had been at once possessive and indifferent.

I doubt if Philip or Frank Whitney discerned the agitation into which Morgan sent the three women in the room, for even Mrs. Babbitt, although she was obviously accustomed to him, looked at him worshipfully. Neither of the men could have sensed the source of his charm since it required the intuitive simplicity with which a woman perceives in a man the very embodiment of temptation. This is one of the mysteries of their sex by which men are infuriated for, being unable to solve it, they believe it to be a hoax: “Why, So and So is a perfect bounder. What can you see in him?” they ask of the women who can only reply, “I can’t explain it.”

“Listen, Harry,” said Mr. Babbitt, “I want you to sing that song Miss Nanny Brewster taught you. You’ll love it, Hope. It’s funny as hell the way Harry does it.”

“I’m not interested and I don’t want to hear it. I think it’s time we went on to dinner.”

But Mr. Morgan had already risen to perform. He moved unsteadily across the room and stood before the Governor Winthrop and in a moment began to sing. Above his strange head, like a moon at half eclipse, Miss Pride’s father stared at the trophy case. His loosely clenched hand rested on a table at his side as if he were about to make it into a fist and pound. The wavering Long Islander sang with a tuneless, distended insolence, rolling his eyes and suddenly closing them as, stopping dead in his song, he stroked imaginary female hips of extraordinary dimensions. The Babbitts, half in tears with laughter, kept filling his glass with straight whiskey, for at the end of each line, by way of punctuation, he drained off what he had. The lewdness came chiefly from his pantomime and his catarrhal voice, for the words that issued from his boneless face were only:

I love to go swimmin’

With bow-legged women

And dive between their legs.

Frank Whitney was pale. “Let’s get him out, McAllister. He’s drunk as a catfish.” He started towards the offender, but Hopestill, who without trying to stop the song, had been gazing up at her grandfather as if supplicating him either to forgive this indignity or to put a stop to it, raised her hand in an apostolic gesture which said, “He has asylum here.”

“He’s perfectly all right, Frank,” she said. “He’s only gay. He inherited two million dollars yesterday and he has every right to sing if he wants to.”

“Repeat refrain!” cried Mr. Babbitt, covering his face with his hands while his thorax hopped convulsively like a jumping bean. Mr. Morgan obliged him and the words traveled slowly through his nose.

The door to the library flung open and crashed against the paneling. Miss Pride, dressed for dinner in garnets and black silk, stood on the threshold appraising the terrain. The first to speak was Harry Morgan who, going towards her with the sober countenance that appears in certain stages of drunkenness, said, “Mrs. Mather, I presume?” Miss Pride’s enameled lenses suddenly could focus only on distant objects. She looked at me and said, “The letters, Sonie, which you promised to mail,” and held them out. Mr. Morgan’s rejected paw faltered uncertainly to his side.

“Good evening, Cousin Lucy,” said Mr. Babbitt, bounding toward her, “I’m glad to see you.” Miss Pride did not share his pleasure but glared straight through his head as if the gimlets of her eyes could puncture the optic nerve. She came to me with the letters. “Hello, Frank. Is Mary coming on for the holidays?” and as she took his hand, she gave me the bunch of envelopes and adroitly, so that no one could see, she pinched the fleshy part of my thumb between two fingernails so hard that I nearly cried out with pain.

For half a minute she stood there while Frank Whitney gave her news of his family. She did not release my thumb until he was finished and then she said, “I must go this minute. Hopestill, bring Frank when you and Philip come to the Countess’. I know Berthe will be delighted.”

“We’re all coming, Auntie,” said Hopestill. “This is Mr. Morgan, Aunt Lucy,”

“Good evening, sir,” said Miss Pride and glanced up at the portrait of her father. “Papa looks en prise. Do set his men up again, Philip.” And she left the room. The only proof I had that she had been angry were the two white crescent marks on my thumb made, in her rage at something with which I had no connection, in the way one hurls a teacup to the floor because the contents of a letter have infuriated him.

“Waiter, bring me my bill,” said Mr. Morgan with a foolish grin. “And cancel my membership in the Somerset. The bouncer gives me the creeps. Are you coming, baby?”

“No,” said Hopestill. “Before you go, Harry, will you apologize to all of us?”

“Now I suggest,” said Mrs. Babbitt in the voice of a peacemaker, “that Harry and John and I all go eat dinner by ourselves and let the ladies and gentlemen alone. Nobody’s mad now but if we don’t go right along everybody will be dreadfully mad except me.”

“I won’t be mad,” pouted Mr. Babbitt. “And Olga won’t be mad, will you, Olga?”

“Well, I’m damned,” said Mr. Morgan, using his hands as binoculars and directing them towards me. “Is that Olga? Troika-ho, Olga!”

They left, Mrs. Babbitt’s giggles leaving a wake behind. If I had been able to speak, I would have been profane, would have used every blasphemous and scatalogical oath I knew to tell Hopestill how I was affected by the knowledge that I had been the object of amused discussion. Olga! Her malice was so rich, so inventive that even now, exposed by the babblings of her drunken friends, she tried to hoodwink me. “I don’t think Sonie looks all that Slavic, do you, Frank?”

The evening lay in ruins. My disappointments, my humiliation, and my scorn bustled through the branches of my nerves, created a tic here and a tingling there, an ache in my skull and fever in my eyeballs.

Hopestill smiled. “Give the poor child a stout drink,” she said. “She isn’t used to the lower classes.”

“Oh, I’ll have a lot to drink,” I said, and she and Philip laughed. They had forgotten us already before we had even reached the threshold. Hopestill was saying, “Well, darling, I’ve come home to stay. Aren’t you glad?”

As soon as I could I left the Countess’ salon and got my cape, but as I was starting down the hall towards the stairs someone laid his hand on my shoulder and I turned to find myself the captive of Mr. Pingrey. He said, “Sonia, Amy is in a tiz over your cutting her. You come straight along with me, you baggage. Mr. Hornblower is here and you have to meet him. He’s just been telling the most delicious thing about Mr. Roosevelt. Did you know that the name is really Rosenfeld?” I was in no frame of mind to meet Your Esteemed Uncle Arthur Hornblower and told Mr. Pingrey that Miss Pride had asked me to run home to fetch something for her.

“Oh, stuff!” said Mr. Pingrey, flapping his hands limply in my face. “You’re a perfect imp sometimes. Very well, but I will absolutely disown you if you don’t meet him when you come back. Do you realize that he knows everyone of importance? Gandhi, Mussolini, Hitler, Trotsky, the Lord knows who. He’s the most literate person here by far.”

I felt this to be a slight exaggeration, but said I had not been aware that the Countess’ parties were intended to be the meeting ground of minds.

“Well!” he gasped. “Frankly I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why on earth would one come otherwise?”

Mr. Pingrey did not drink or smoke, making his abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and highly seasoned food a fetish as obstinate as a vice. He put his hand to his heart as if he had been wounded there and might, after his valedictory, topple over dead at my feet. “I cannot, I simply cannot understand this transformation in you.” His eyes, similar to Amy Brooks’ (both of them were victims of excessive thyroid secretions, a bond which strengthened their friendship, I am sure, and played a strong part in their marriage and their subsequent production of two children with the same glandular vagary), bulged forth as he bent his ruddy face down towards mine to gaze upon the frog which, before the gods had been provoked to wrath, had been a charming maiden.

“Then go on to your . . . punch bowl!” he cried, and stepped aside to let me pass. Had I lingered a few minutes longer, he would have used such words as “wassail” and “negus” and “sack” to show that his acquaintance with alcohol was purely literary. Once, at an informal luncheon, he had inquired of his hostess if her servants made the mead themselves. “Mead? What is that?” she asked. He indicated the glasses of Chablis. “Oh,” said the lady, who did not like him and was also vain of her learning, “No, my athelings have lost the receipt. This is a simple grape concoction made by the Christians in Gaul.”

I was halfway down the stairs when he leaned over the bannister and implored, “Do meet Mr. Hornblower. He wants us all to come to tea at his house tomorrow. He’s terribly anxious to meet you and says he will be ever so interested to hear your political conflicts—I told him, you see, that you were half Russian and half German.”

As the next day was Sunday, I could not go. “I will be away tomorrow,” I told him.

“Oh, but you must come,” he protested urgently, “because Mrs. Hornblower will be there too!” as though, if it were a rare thing to meet Mr. Hornblower it was an even rarer one to meet his wife. I repeated my refusal and Mr. Pingrey withdrew his head but not before he had stuck out his tongue at me like a peckish child and flung out, “Crosspatch!”

I had gained the outer hall when the door to the dining-room opened and the chauffeur shot past me like someone on a surf-board. He was carried along over the carpet by the leashed Doberman and the boxer to whom he applied, under his breath, the word “bitches” with venomous accuracy. Through the door I could see the supper table with its dishes arranged as tastefully as if they had been bouquets of flowers and were to serve no purpose other than ornament. The Countess had been planning this for months, ordering the strangest of the foods through importers, scouring Boston and New York for the finest Liebfraumilch and Niersteiner and champagne, herself supervising the decanting of the sweet wines and the liqueurs, and living through each step of the lengthy preparation of the daube glacé as if upon the proper contents of the bags of herbs depended her social success.

I had hoped to find the Countess here alone so that I could make my excuses to her, and I was annoyed to see that she was not in the room at all, but that wandering back and forth before the table were Baron Kalenkoff and a Jewish brain surgeon who were making hearty meals of the daube, the cucumbers in sour cream, the herring and salmon and caviar, the cheeses, olives, salads. Every now and again they abandoned the table only to repair to the side-board where the wines were cooling. The two accommodators, hired for the evening, and the Alsatian waitresses stared stonily at the carnage, stood near-by the gormandizers waiting to pounce upon the empty dishes and bear them away to the dumb-waiter to be, if possible, replaced.

I entered the dining-room intending to seek the Countess in the pantry. This room alone had been left untouched by the new mistress of the house; its walls were hung with Audubon’s eagle attacking the inflated white belly of a fish, his Iceland gulls and curlews, and interspersed amongst the birds were Currier and Ives Maine landscapes and paddle-wheel boats. Miss Pride said of it, “I could digest my food there as well as I did in Josie Brooks’ day if only Berthe didn’t let her livestock run free.”

As I paused in the doorway, the Countess appeared, coming out of the pantry with the intention, probably, of having a last minute look before she allowed supper to be announced. It must have been shocking for her to come upon two guests who had gobbled up visible portions of the food and had destroyed the appearance of half the dishes by their wanton hunger and who greeted her with their mouths full, one hand holding a slice of bread piled high with a layer of pickled herring, a layer of jellied partridge, one of salt salmon, and topped by a round of marinated onion, the other hand clasping by its neck a liter of cold wine. But the Countess’ hesitation was the briefest possible. Undismayed, she advanced and she said, as though she were delighted by what she saw, smiling, her large fair face aglow with hospitality, her diadem of sapphires forming for this perfect hostess an angelic halo, “Oh, you didn’t find the Niersteiner. You’re drinking that flat Moselle. Here, let me get you some real wine.”

Then, having finished her ministrations to the vandals and having caught sight of me, she cried, “Ah, angel! I was just going to look for you. What are you doing with your cape? Going? But you’ve only been here five minutes!”

I told her I was feeling a little ill, I believed I was catching cold. “Oh, no! How shocking! I won’t have you taking cold.” She thrust a plate of lobster en mayonnaise in front of the Baron and said, “Try this, Alexy, and give me your honest opinion. Will you excuse me for a moment?” And taking me by the arm, she led me into the hall and towards the yellow sofa.

“Now!” she said, adjusting the camellias at my shoulder to her liking. “Now tell me why you’re playing such a trick on me.”

“Oh, adorable monster! But I’ll keep your secret. Is he gifted? Is he a gentleman? Darling, don’t think I’m prying, but I love you! I could not bear it if my Euphrysone weren’t treated well!”

Anxious to escape and afraid that if she kept me any longer I would blurt out the whole story of my wounded dignity, I put my cape around my shoulders and laughed, “He, Countess, is only Dostoievsky whom I shall read when I’ve taken an aspirin for my cold.”

“Seriously,” she said looking, indeed, very serious, “I am only thinking how Lucy Pride would feel about it. You know her anti-Semitism. But you do as you like, my dear pet! I will let you go only if you promise to be amused!”

“Oh, I do promise!” I assured her and I extended my hand in farewell, wishing to end this baffling dialogue. The Countess got up, kissed me, and went to the stairs. “How stupid of me! I forgot to tell you that he’s waiting in the library.”

I had known, even before I opened the door, that I would find Nathan Kadish in the library. He was standing in the lamplight, his birthmark towards me.

“I should hope you might be, you poor girl! What you must have been through! Had I only known I would have come to solace you months ago.”

“It was a very neat coup. I saw you come in here with that St. Bernard—what a moron he looks like—and waited a minute and rang the bell myself. I must say I was ready to give up when I got a gander at that butler. He was tough sledding, but the lady was a pushover.”

I saw that he was going over, with an admiring eye, the details of my attire, and I likewise allowed my look to travel upwards from his feet in muddied white shoes, over his immaculate gray suit and bright red bow tie to his face.

“Well, Sonie? Well, how would you like to get drunk? I very much regret that as I am currently in love with someone else, this is the only amusement I can offer you.”

It was the only amusement I was capable of enjoying. Even the prospect was sedative. As we went into the hall, Nathan said, “I assume that you won’t mind doing the boozing in my sort of saloon?” We met the soulless face of the butler who, opening the door for us, said to me, “Good evening, Miss Marburg. I hope you won’t find it too wet underfoot.”

“Want to come along?” said Nathan to him, but the man, ignoring him, said to me, “Of course you have a very short walk home.”

“She’s not going home, you buzzard,” said Nathan, looking closely into the snobbish face. “Slave!”

Both the man and I were too shocked to speak. The white door slowly closed and I was certain that I looked for the last time upon the Countess von Happel’s brass knocker.

Chapter Three