[Illustration]
I
I realized that I was sorry to be back in New York. Molly Underhill
had telephoned: “Oh, darling, I’m so remorseful that we didn’t meet
your ship! Eva Litchfield and I were going to be waiting for you with
cheers because you’re home at last, and then Eva couldn’t get away.
She’s in the last throes of a book, you know--or maybe you don’t know;
you’ve become an expatriate, haven’t you?” Gasping, lisping, gushingly
affectionate because she was speaking to me instead of talking about
me, she eventually came to the point and invited me to dine with her at
our old haunt, one of those establishments run by an Italian whose name
it would be a shame to give. There was much to hear, she assured me;
things had been popping, as they could pop only in New York. “But I’ll
tell all, in the taxi,” she promised. “Only, the drive will be short,
and the tale is long.”
In New York, the tale is always long, but one gets it in fragments
delivered between the necessary snatches of sleep and the attenuated
diet of the New Yorker determined to be slim. Molly explained that she
was at liberty to introduce me, in a way of speaking, to the city that
had so radically changed, so phenomenally grown, during my protracted
stay abroad: she had finished the proofs of a volume of her poems and,
she added, as usual when she had sojourned in the empyrean, she felt
the need of a strongly human contact. I informed her that on my own
part I had come back to write a book about the ways and mistakes of
Americans in France; one had to get out of a place in order to write a
novel about it. When conversing with Molly Underhill, the trick was to
watch her face; her expression might not harmonize with her words. I
was at a disadvantage when she drawled: “And then, my lamb, you purpose
leaving New York in order to write a book about us? Oh, you’ll get
stories out of us! You can’t conceive of the racket instituted by our
crowd; and Eva Litchfield is our pacemaker. I suspect it’s because of
an underlying discontent with her failure in the marriage line.”
Molly forced information only upon reluctant listeners. It was as if I
harboured no curiosity that I asked: “Why do you call it a failure?”
“The look in her mother-in-law’s eye,” chuckled Molly; and hung up. She
had a lip-licking chuckle. It prepared me to combat whatever position
she had taken in regard to Eva Litchfield. I did not go so far as to
decide to range myself squarely on Eva’s side, it being problematical
if a fight were raging around her or if she herself had precipitated
some squabble among her friends. This point time, and no human
reasoning, would clear up. In our crowd, one always disputed, but the
gage of battle, promptly trampled underfoot, was soon overlooked, the
war cry settled on when all was over.
The frantic American spirit of crowding into a day all that should be
spread over a week caught me up and swept me out to be lost in a sea
of controversial gossip. I found my time arranged for; I was to rush
from one engagement to another without the necessary pauses in which
to piece together my impressions of things told me. I was to lunch
with Charles Glidden the novelist, in a “quiet little place where we
can talk about Eva Litchfield’s married life.” I was to go to Sutton
Place for cocktails with Florence Quincy the short-story writer, who
would invite only a few people “so that we can talk about poor Eva’s
fiasco.” In regard to Eva Litchfield, conditions in New York had not
changed. From all sides would come allusions to her, stray information
about her, acrimonious or friendly discussion of her. If she failed to
set the pace in the sense alluded to by Molly Underhill, she set it in
the way of arousing unflagging talk. She had, always, so set it. She
was one of the women--lucky or unlucky, as one might consider them--who
are discussed. I wished immensely to hear the latest arguments for
and against her. I burned with curiosity, composed of friendship and
of that prying interest of the novelist, to know the details of her
marriage, which had taken place shortly after my departure for a stay
of two years in France. Not having returned to New York for the purpose
of finding out, today I realised that this was what I must find out.
It became a piece of news that New York withheld only to drop on my
head when I should be off my guard. The tales I was to hear would be
partisan tales; the truth was the brick held in reserve. For, odious
as I felt myself in wanting to know, I still feared to hear the truth.
That I was promptly to hear everything else was left in no doubt;
underlying the various invitations there was the projected weaving into
a whole piece of those vicarious hints, those veiled prognostications,
those omens of the future as read from the signposts of the immediate
past, that our friends had left behind their occasional European
travels. Authors do not write chatty letters to each other: they save
their lucubrations for the printed work; and what they had dropped in
the course of the necessarily hurried talk of casual encounters as we
drifted anchorless had not exposed what might be the trouble between
Eva Litchfield and Nicholas Van Suydam.
I said to myself: “Dinah Avery, my good woman, you had best furbish
your own ideas--your recollections--before swimming out to sea. For
swim out to sea you must, and will, before the day is over.” From the
thirtieth-floor windows of my small apartment I looked at the sky-line
whose fame was flashing around the world and was physically shocked:
had corresponding changes taken place in my friends? With that sky-line
assaulting my nerves it required no wide digression to speculate about
Eva’s husband: he was one of the rising young architects of the city,
and that the steel ribs of one or more monsters had been plucked from
the side of this Adam was probable. I recalled him as a handsome man
who lacked hardness of fibre. How could he bring about a drastic
change in Eva? Life failed to scratch the surface of her absorption in
her work. Her experiences were of the soul and not of the body. She
was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her
body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her
mind astounded, but no physical impression would have been made on
her; she would still show to the world, and even to those friends in
her confidence, a face almost nun-like in its essential purity. No man
could hurt Eva for all time, I reflected comfortably: and at once I
recalled the comment made on her by the caricaturist, Justo Zermonte.
Zermonte had said without apology what many men had suspected but
hesitated to acknowledge: Eva was a crystal, and a blow might leave her
unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage
and shatter her.
As usual when she was being discussed, Spencer Mapes the essayist had
been eager; he had an insect-like persistence in stinging; but he might
have been as impersonally curious as Zermonte when he asked: “Where
would that blow have to strike--the shattering blow, I mean?”
According to a trick of his, Zermonte was sketching on the back of a
menu card and did not lift his eyes. He shrugged. Those human beings
whose lines of cleavage had been struck the shattering blow were more
vulnerable to caricature, and therefore more interesting to him, than
the unbroken Eva Litchfield; he could not understand the writer’s
desire to peel off the skins of the onion, for only the dreadful core
was in his line. But Spencer Mapes of the literary mind continued to
speculate; he seemed to buzz, when he so discussed his friends. “If
the crystal were to be heated?” he suggested. Zermonte regretted that,
not being a lapidary, he did not know. “I was wrong, of course,” Mapes
kept at it. “A crystal can’t be heated.”
Eva had sat looking at them while they so arranged her under a
microscope. She smiled with a faint amusement that could have been
genuine but that was merely her lovely indifferent agreement on a point
which failed to interest her; she had but a slight sense of humour.
Humour would have marred the delicacy of her feeling for beauty. She
tolerated no realism. Characteristically she suggested: “Why not have
said a diamond? The diamond is eternal.” Nicholas Van Suydam, indeed,
could not hurt her. She did not care whether her happiness were eternal
if only her work would be.
But Molly had said, “The look in her mother-in-law’s eye.” I felt as if
I were at the motion pictures, as if I were managing the picture; for
I cranked the projecting machine a little further and saw, clearly and
accurately, Nicholas Van Suydam’s mother as I had seen here in fact.
His publishers had given a tea to our favourite Englishman. The
entresol of the Savoy Plaza roared with our lifted voices, and
smelled of dying flowers, and occasionally someone paused long enough
absent-mindedly to eat a sandwich. Eva Litchfield had taken possession
of Nicholas Van Suydam and, as I recall, was in a less crowded room
talking with him. She had not captured him against his will; never
had I seen a young man so fatuously lifted above himself by a woman’s
notice. Eva was a delicate thistledown blowing across his path,
dazzling him, luring him. While I stayed, they did not again mingle
with the crowd. And Spencer Mapes lingered near the door through which
they had disappeared, leaning against the white woodwork with his own
handsome head thrown back--not brooding but waiting.
The Englishman stood decently to receive those invited to meet him and
no one wasted a minute on him. In a mild aside to those of us within
hearing, he said that it was very New York. He stood watching the
people who did not so much as glance at him because already they knew
how he looked. They were in perpetual motion. They drew together and
fell apart; and so quickly did they shift from group to group that
one got the impression of their never quite closing their lips: what
they had started to say in one group was continued in the next group
in which they found themselves. It is impossible to accost a scuttling
mouse: they dashed past the guest of honour with terrifying speed. The
noise of the conclave surged down the stairs; and such was the volume
of this concatenation that the elderly lady who now, with the most
beautiful suddenness, appeared at the head of the stairs must have had
to push against it as against material opposition. But this opposition
which was not consciously directed against her had had, evidently, the
effect of stiffening some as yet unrevealed resolution. Also, she might
have been upheld by many taffeta petticoats. She was alone but gave the
impression of being attended. And such was the security of her evident
faith in her impregnable position that, too shrewd not to perceive that
the crowd ignored her, she waved aside any discomfort arising from this
by her own sweeping condemnation of all that she saw. Her cold grey
eyes travelled from face to face, appraising with a complete and icy
detachment--no interest whatever in who it might be the orbit of whose
flight she chanced to observe.
Beyond a few curious glances, the milling crowd paid no attention
to her. From his far doorway, Spencer Mapes, however, stared with
absorption. James Pomeroy, adjusting his pince-nez, his fingers using
on its narrow black ribbon the tenderness of touch that he would use
on a rare old book, came up to say to the Englishman, “I saw her--on
her way here, although it didn’t occur to me that she could conceivably
be on the way here--driving uptown in a horse-drawn carriage!” But, at
one time or another, most people had seen her maroon brougham with a
red-faced coachman in a puce livery expertly handling a pair of bays.
She might be said to be the last of the old buildings now in process
of demolition. In a backwash formed by the elderly lady’s antagonistic
near presence, the small cluster of us stood staring. Novelists stare
because they never know when they will use a person as a character in a
story. They stare without blinking, making no excuse to the object of
their fixed regard; they are working a photographic memory. And here
was a middle-aged woman who declined to appear younger than she was. It
was a find. We examined her in unabashed glee.
On her own part, she looked at us and refused to see us. About her
there was something of the lone knight girded for the combat. Her
purpose was so definite that by it she was set aside from the people
who aimlessly charged past; she waited for an opponent upon whom the
eyes of her mind were already fixed. I think that we might have
talked about her at the top of our lungs and she would not have
stirred a muscle of her face, so bent was she on an exact aim. She
was a force which had surged in on us. We felt her presence. But I
got the impression that in spite of the opposition of her ignoring
quiescence she watched us. She feared something; and that she refused
to acknowledge the existence of this apprehension did not minimize it.
On some one issue she had staked a thing so big that she quailed at the
failure she had not yet in her soul acknowledged to be possible. Her
hands, in too-small white gloves, clasped each other so tightly that
the kid stretched, and drew, and bulged. But her face was composed--old
ivory in its hard finish. Her decorous feet, in high buttoned boots,
rested side by side, and it was evidently with an effort of her muscles
that she kept them so properly on the floor; for she was by now seated
on one of those dreadful hotel sofas that are slippery and are too
high. About her there was something charming, and something forbidding,
and through all, and arising from the cause of all, this emanation of
terror. I got the idea that she forbade us to approach her because of
this terror. But what that would touch her could we bring down on her?
Molly Underhill suggested: “She does look like a scared rat.” She
looked like nothing of the sort; her fear was not fear of the fight but
of what might cause the fight.
James Pomeroy said that he took his hat off to her. “I never before saw
such iron self-control. Do you notice that she doesn’t tap her foot on
the floor, as all women under stress do? For you’ll admit that she’s
under stress?”
The Englishman undertook to explain her: he also was analysing her for
future use. “I have an old aunt,” he began. “That generation of nice
old ladies had no use for their own sex. You notice that her attention
is riveted on Spencer Mapes? Oh--unobtrusively, delicately; but with
such passion of feeling!”
“Spence wouldn’t see her even if she were younger. We all
know--although we deny it, and can’t after all explain the
ramifications of it--that he has eyes for no one besides Eva
Litchfield. I’m not sure it’s love----” speculated Florence Quincy, who
did not care. This was an old question with us; none of us cared; but,
not necessarily with viciousness but with the greatest persistence, we
dissected Spencer Mapes’ intentions towards Eva.
The Englishman murmured that he intended making a virtue of his
necessity to know more of her. He approached the elderly lady and
enquired if there were something he could do for her. He was a
huge man with a kind pink-and-white face and a gasping voice. Her
own voice, when she replied, was dry as bone-dust, but she stated,
graciously enough, that she recognized him by his pictures. Severely
she added that she had thought the reception was given to him. And her
somewhat acrid amusement, when he replied that so he had been given to
understand, proved that her fear was not of the guests now hovering
near.
She said: “I came to get my son.” There was finality about her
announcement. In the same tone she might have said “I came to snatch my
son from hell fire.”
“Your son, then, is a writer?” the Englishman ventured.
Her figure tightened: it was impossible for her to draw herself up; so
far as one could see, she had drawn herself up at birth and never let
go. “We have no artists in our family,” she gave him back. She remarked
that she was Mrs. Schuyler Van Suydam, and added more kindly: “My son
is by way of being an architect. Possibly, in England also, you permit
your sons to play before they settle down?” She had disposed of the
question of how she came to be there and was done with him. She swept
the room with her disapproval, and turned her chilling regard back to
the Englishman and disapproved of him. In spite of the alleged paucity
of such stuff in her family, she was a great pantomime artist. She sat
on her sofa--squarely in the middle as if to defy an author to sit
beside her. But I saw that her throat was convulsed. Her eyes were
bleak with more than her aversion to her surroundings.
The Englishman indulged in his soundless laughter. Throughout an
attack of this mirth, he might be without emotion of any sort, so
expressionless would be his face; it might be a physical instead of a
mental spasm. He swallowed every second word of his reply, and on the
resulting incoherence took himself off. He again mentioned his old aunt
to us. He became so amused at the recollection that he gasped himself
out of telling more. The old aunt remained in our memory as one who
could well have been what is called a character. One had, always, to
supplement what the Englishman recounted.
We had noticed, with annoyance, the presence at the tea of two
intruders who were not potential characters. These intruders Mrs. Van
Suydam now summoned. We did not see by what method she summoned them;
when she summoned anyone, that person felt it in the air, possibly. But
we heard her say to the young man “I shall be obliged if you will fetch
my son.” Anthony Bloodgood was always in a state of high enjoyment; he
laughed with his hazel eyes, and smiled with his too-small mouth over
which he wore a little moustache because to twirl its speculative ends
gave him something to do. He stood tugging at the ridiculous moustache.
It was plain that he did not wish to do as she had requested. But
she got the better of him. And then she obviously grew more and more
uneasy. She sat tensely, looking at one spot on the wall. But by the
steady flicker of her black bonnet against the sunset outside the
window I saw that she was trembling. Often as I have seen Mrs. Van
Suydam since my return to New York, I shall always think of her as she
was that afternoon: her bonnet trembling against the sunset and her
feet curiously still. And suddenly she laughed, that aged laugh with a
cracked high cackling in it. She was laughing at herself for trembling.
The girl, Gertrude Cuyler, sat beside her on the sofa; and she sighed.
It was the kind of sigh that sinks into the imagination as an ominous
thing. The older woman took it as being personal to her as well as to
the girl; the long breath that she drew was the suppression of a sigh
as deep as the girl’s. They did not look at each other.
Anthony Bloodgood came back, his eyes wary now. He said: “Nick’s
coming. He didn’t know you were to be here. He was talking to Eva
Litchfield.”
It was a case of the individual against life. I acknowledge that I ran
away. I heard afterwards that Eva married the son shortly after I left
America.
The elder Mrs. Van Suydam had a marvellous power of waiting: was she
waiting for what seemed to her the inevitable end of such a mating?
Eva, I knew, could not wait; her interest was a bright flame that
scorched, and burned, and defeated its end. In Molly Underhill’s
telephonic chatter I had detected a dark undercurrent, a play of
her fancy over what partly fed her liking for the gossip that is a
dismembering of one’s friends and partly shook her. If the same chilly
finger had been drawn down her spine and Eva’s she could not more
surely have flinched.
Thoughtfully I walked up Fifth Avenue to lunch with Charles Glidden. It
was one of those dull days when the skies seem to weep soot. Wishing,
as I had inferred, to talk uninterruptedly, he had selected the one
restaurant of all others that might be called our luncheon clubhouse.
The game would be to do our confidential talking in an immense hurry
and so forestall inquisitive friends who could be counted on to join
us at any moment. Glidden was a delightful man with whom one could be
silent without impoliteness and with whom, consequently, one always
wished to talk. But one talked at him, and knew that his few mild
comments on what was being imparted had little to do with what he might
have said if he gossipped. In the fusillade of quotations from one’s
friends that riddled us when something had happened, he could not
be quoted: one might suspect him of the deep policy of being canny.
His taciturnity sprang from no lack of interest in the foolishness
of mankind; for if nothing was happening he made it happen. In his
habit of being intimate for a while with one after another, and during
this period diverting their tastes, he had been largely instrumental
in forming the little circles which whirled, and dissolved, and spun
into new orbits. And always he appeared to be intent on drawing out
what his friends could offer on the altar of his esoteric amusement.
In his definite withdrawal of himself from all upsetting contacts with
unarranged life, Glidden docketed gatherings arranged according to his
wish as exhibits in the closed museum of his mind. One sometimes had
the creepy feeling that he listened to one’s thoughts. One never knew
what he on his own part thought; whether he approved or whether he
disapproved of anything remained a mystery. He had never been heard to
criticise. And yet, all of criticism and deferred sentences were in his
quiet eyes. When he watched in this fashion, his eyes did not reflect
light, nor did they appear to move unless following the antics of the
victim under observation. There was no way of predicting on whom his
disconcerting scrutiny would fall next; his friends tried to read on
his face what he had decided about them and failed alarmingly to get a
clue.
I remembered the effect upon Eva of this trait in a man whose praise
she very much wanted. We had dined at his apartment; and it was in
the early days when she had been less certain of the reputation of
her books: of their quality she had never experienced a doubt. The
Glidden dinner table was always the quintessence of simplicity. Upon
this occasion a single blossom, in a rare vase, leered insinuatingly
from the centre of the board. “What is it?” we had asked, strangely
attracted. He did not know, himself; he had thought it amusing. It
might be, he speculated, the arrested product of an affair between an
orchid and a tiger lily. Throughout the meal, the flower waved and
nodded as if independent of any outside propulsion, amazingly giving
the impression that from its calyx there burst its own ululation. Eva
had become nervous and excited. She had sat at her host’s right, slim
and shining, proud and rather rare; she might have had some remote
kinship with the blossom that, slim and mocking, elevated its head
above even the rarity of the vase that held it. Possibly Glidden had
seen that his decoration and his guest of honour were in accord; he
might have arranged it; his eyes stared with the same glassiness at Eva
and at the flower.
Eva whispered to me: “I am in terror of his silence! He is like a
hooded falcon. I never know what he truly thinks of my books. Has he
ever told you what he thinks of my work?”
When I am nervous I suspect that I wear my hair too long; it falls over
my forehead into my eyes, and I push at it and feel like swearing. “Ask
him and see,” I suggested crossly.
But she gasped that she was afraid to; she could not bear it, if he
said he did not believe in her; and Spencer Mapes had said, a moment
before--I knew she was trying to stop thinking about what Mapes had
said, because she surmised that the important thing was what he had not
said. Molly Underhill often bragged that we were a peculiar lot; and
sometimes we were afraid of each other, sometimes we were indifferent
to each other, but always we were aware of each other. Molly herself,
while pronouncing upon us, wore a blush like an angry sunset, a blush
that cast her mouth into such shadow that she appeared to have no lips.
Speed being impossible on a New York street, I had time to brood, and
laugh, over the agonies that we had lived through. “He’ll tell me
nothing,” I promised myself.
The stench from the exhausts of automobiles, and the satanic thump of
riveters at work, unable to escape from the earth’s envelope, hurled
themselves back with malignancy, assaulting the senses with their hints
of limbo. Along the side streets blew a clammy breath from rivers
tainted as the air. A few dispirited snowflakes straggled downwards,
as if aware that when they touched the pavement they would be violated
by the grime of the life of a city. Pedestrians scooted, stopping
erratically at the brink of the crossings, held back by the law but
unprotected by these laws that they themselves had made. I found that
already I had adjusted myself to great changes in New York: I dashed
with the rest, for the short distance between the cross streets,
keeping abreast of the motor traffic because at each of these crossings
all living things, and all machinery, halted at the change of lights.
Whenever we so halted, I looked fearfully up at cliffs of edifices. In
these artificial cliffs at the base of which I in proportion crept, I
seemed to feel the shaken fist of the city’s non-natural immensity.
The sound of horses’ hoofs, competing by its very insignificance
with the magnitude of the roar of the motor traffic, came up behind
me. Without turning my head, I knew who drove so insolently up and
down a regulated Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Van Suydam, Eva Litchfield’s
mother-in-law, was the last of the elderly ladies who had used to take
their airing in horse-drawn vehicles.
Alone in her maroon brougham, refusing to enjoy the sights for which
presumably she had come out, Mrs. Van Suydam did not relax; she sat
upright because she had always sat straight, stood erect, and faced
life with a stiff spine. She wore, as always, handsome black garments
of a style introduced by Queen Alexandra. On her head perched her usual
bonnet-like hat, made more secure in its insecurity by a tightly drawn
wisp of veil ending at the tip of her intolerant nose. Never had Mrs.
Van Suydam’s veil been observed to flutter, for hussies allowed their
veils to flutter. Her eyelashes brushed against this mesh stretched
in harlequin-like rhomboids, and were forced upward into rays, and
lent her a startled aspect that belied her. Although she had driven
uptown from her mansion in Washington Square North, she still tugged
at her gloves that, in the fashion of the days when she was a girl and
ladies had no use for their hands, were too small for her; she squeezed
them over her palms and winced slightly; and as I watched her, in our
parallel progress, she folded these white-kid-gloved hands of a lady,
lifted her eyes against her veil, and stared icily ahead.
The green lights winked out, the red lights blinked on, and at
the corner a policeman held up the hand of authority. Undoubtedly
she said to herself that this was modern nonsense; for she lifted
the speaking-trumpet to her lips and, I was sure, directed the
coachman--his name was beautifully Higginson--to drive on. As she
thus infringed the law, she sat with unyielding spine and met the cold
stare of the lions in front of the Library and returned it with a stare
as impersonally disparaging as their own. Not an emotion disturbed
her features. She drove against the lights because she had never
consented to recognize the lights. The hoofs of her horses seemed to
make a sharper sound then ever, as Higginson flourished his whip over
the sleek flanks of his pride and joy. And this breach of regulations
apparently delighted the elderly coachman and left the elderly lady
as it found her, indifferent. The policeman grinned at the bays whose
tails, bobbed and gaily twitching, seemed to mock him, and, turning to
the columns of automobiles over which he had control, shared the joke
with various chauffeurs. As I halted on the curb, irresolute because
without Mrs. Van Suydam’s scornful sureness, I heard him remark: “The
ol’ girl don’t seem to take it in that she might get killed.” In this
he was right. Mrs. Van Suydam had never recognized violent death.
Her lips moved: was it possible that she muttered? I followed the
dart of her eyes as she stabbed with them a building in process of
blatant construction. Her mutter had consisted of two short, sharp
ejaculations, and embodied her ideas on progress. “Humph! Indeed!”
This new architecture, which must have affronted her taste because of
its difference from the red brick and white trim of her New York, was
partly of her son’s making. She could not but feel that, in pursuing
his ambition to build greatly, he had fallen into vagary. New York
had been a pleasant town. By day the air had been clear and good
to breathe, and by night a clean and intimate moon had looked down
on family life. These days, the moon came up only to be faded by
the vulgarity of beacons on spiky towers. The moon flinched: as she
flinched: as she could wish that her son flinched.
The ringing sound of hoofs beat defiantly against the steady drone
of motors rolling in two solid columns up and down the Avenue, and
the snub nose of the perfect Higginson rose in air polluted by carbon
monoxide.
Charles Glidden had lost no urbanity since I had last seen him. He had
only one surprise up his sleeve: he was prepared to talk, and to talk
about Eva, and it only required my question of how she was making out
with the Van Suydams to bring it about. “I think it’s rather funny that
she married that particular man,” I gurgled, with Mrs. Van Suydam in my
mind’s eye.
He made the concession to his previous manner of turning upon me an
opaque regard. “I never try to alter conditions amongst my friends.
Diseases are so much more interesting than remedies.” This was as near
the line of his intention as was usually got out of him.
“Ah that’s unfair to me,” I expostulated. “I meant no slur on Eva; it
wasn’t necessary to throw me off a track.”
“But you’re so ambiguous in your talk,” he objected. However, he
committed himself. “I think he’s a dreadful fellow. Of course, she
revolts me, occasionally. What does she want? What is she reaching for?
And what--and this is the interesting point--is she trying to do with
this man she married?”
“I wish I knew,” I sighed.
“She herself doesn’t know. And what at best,” he lamented, “can we
believe of what people tell us of themselves? There’s no compulsion
on them to tell the truth--if they know it. You will have to judge by
Eva’s actions. And the only consistent thing about her--the only thing
running in a straight line dead ahead to a positive aim--is her work.
The quality of her work never fluctuates; the quality of her social
ambition, and the ambition, if one might so call it, of her heart, is
influenced to an extraordinary degree by the subject matter of her
books. Did you ever notice that she writes only of people living, with
propriety, in old Georgian houses? There you are,” he laughed. “She
writes her Georgian house, and then wishes with all her heart to live
in it.”
I demanded to know why she was not, then, content? I reminded him that
she had a Victorian mother-in-law living in a Georgian house. “And yet,
since my return I’m hearing nothing but hints of trouble.”
He assured me that he was endeavouring to make me see it. “She reverses
the custom about her cake: when she gets it she doesn’t wish to eat it
because no longer does she understand why in the first place she wanted
it.”
I sighed that she got herself into hopeless complications, and at once
he was overwhelmed with masculine distaste. “Don’t try to ‘help’.” His
smile could be nothing but an amiable sneer.