“Precisely what I was saying,” he admitted. “Poor Eva was led astray
by her admirations. She fancied that she would be happy because of the
exclusiveness of the Van Suydams. In Eva’s eyes, exclusiveness is a
beauty; she goes everywhere because she enjoys making an impression,
she runs with everyone because she wants to hear what they say about
her, and she would love to hate it all.”
As I suspected this to be profoundly true, I said: “I don’t agree with
you.”
“After all,” he said to this, “you’ve just got back. Wait until you’ve
picked up the threads.”
I shrugged it off with “At this rate, I’ll know all by the end of the
day.”
The house boasted the dimmest corners in town. From one of these
umbrageous retreats came Winnie Conant and James Pomeroy to greet the
cocktails. The dapperness of Pomeroy at once permeated the room. He
had a childlike smile and hinting laughter. When he spoke his mouth
pursed into the semblance of a kiss, and his words were the more
startling because under their caressing there was no kiss. His remarks
were listened to because if one did not hear what he said one would
be tormented over a suspicion that he had said it at one’s expense.
The fact that he poked fun in his friends’ faces made it no more
comfortable to brood over what he might have said upon the occasions
when one did not listen. His face, even when flushed with laughter,
conveyed an elegance, his enunciation a nicety, as flexible as his
mind. He said: “But--Dinah darling!--of course you realize that Eva
would be immensely pleased, if she knew how much we talk about her.”
I admitted that she would not resent the quantity of the talk, but I
speculated as to whether she would like the quality of it. “I mean
this: since I landed this morning I’ve heard talk about Eva on all
sides, from every source, and with various interpretations put upon her
simplest act. Now, there’s something I want to know: why?”
Winnie Conant said simply: “It’s on account of her marriage.” Winnie
wrote juveniles. She had the lightness of fancy that children adored.
She had no children of her own, did not want them, and in fact had no
use for the budding mind. But with those who had never met her she was
a by-word for her sweet motherliness. She lived with her husband, Addis
Wickersham, in Macdougal Alley--why, no one knew, but we suspected that
Addis had nowhere else found a library sufficiently vast for his books.
“You know how Eva comes into a room--gorgeously dressed when she knows
it isn’t a formal party?”
I argued that she had always done this; her marriage could have worked
differences, but her love of fine raiment was her own. “She dresses
for her own satisfaction; she takes a narcissus-like joy in being a
picture.”
Winnie’s surprise at this was genuine. “I hadn’t expected you to be the
one to call her a narcissist. Well, anyway, the effect of her entrances
is more shattering than ever now she has her husband at heel. And
how on earth can we talk, when he’s around? I’ll just tell you: you
might as well see how things are going; and one party that that man’s
presence spoils is like any other that he puts an end to. They don’t
live so far from us, and every now and then they drop in after dinner.
There are people at our place, usually, as you may remember. Well,
anyway, one evening Eva sailed in looking like a Botticelli virgin in
cloth-of-gold. Only--she was brittle. You know how she gets? She gives
the impression, when in that mood, of choosing her words with care--as
if they were going to the printer. Her husband followed her in; and
he was laughing. It’s unusual, to catch Nicholas Van Suydam enjoying
a good laugh when he’s with any of us. He wasn’t dressed, by the way;
said she’d taken him by surprise with her ball costume. And, Dinah,
doesn’t that one thing show how little he knows her? Anyway, she told
me what he had said on the way to us. You know, of course, that if you
get Eva at the right moment there’s nothing she won’t tell? He had
reminded her that these studios used to be the stables belonging to his
mother’s neighbours. And she had said it had atmosphere. He had come
back at her with the reminder that that stiff and starched old coachman
of his mother’s lives above his mother’s stable, which, as it happens,
is two doors from us in the Alley. And, she said, she stamped her foot
at him and remarked that he couldn’t make her lose her temper, because
she simply adored his mother’s old-fashioned ways. She said that the
old lady is a real literary character. ‘Good lord!’ he said, raising
his eyes to heaven. Eva actually does admire that old woman. She said
to him that his mother was a literary remains, that she had never
seen anything like her, that she was an anachronism. She wound up by
thanking her stars that she’d found such a thing in New York, of all
places. And that’s when he again rolled his eyes and said ‘Good lord!
She _is_ New York!’”
I waited to see if anyone else would comment. They did not; they had
heard it before. So I put it to Winnie that I had got no impression of
a scene in what she had told.
Winnie finished her cocktail in such haste that she was further
delayed by a fit of choking. With a flap of her hand she begged me to
wait a minute; she was coming to it. With the further flourish of her
now empty glass she might have been dashing her challenge into the
face of Eva’s defiant husband. “It seems that he made fun of our two
names--Addis’ and mine--over our front doorbell. It seems that it’s a
bone of contention between them that on her books Eva still uses her
maiden name alone.”
Florence the unmarried smiled. “Why do you suppose Eva told you?” she
speculated.
Winnie gloated over the fact that, so she said, one could always get
things out of Eva. “And how can you take him, after all--that husband
of hers? He’s made no attempt to fit into the circle of Eva’s friends.
Eva told us that he said he believed marriage should be an abdication
of this willingness to listen to the advice of friends. I do think,”
Winnie exclaimed, “that smoking a pipe gives a man an advantage over
us; and they know it, the nasty things! Nicholas Van Suydam stretched
out his long legs and leaned back and clenched that pipe stem between
his teeth and grinned at us; and when I asked point-blank what was on
his mind he mumbled around the filthy pipe that he’d been saying to
himself ‘My man, if ever there was a time in your life when you had
better sit tight, this is it!’”
“Ah splendid!” murmured Pomeroy.
Winnie pushed her complaint. Eva, it seems, had said briskly “Nick
darling, we’ve got to get used to things. And hadn’t we better start in
by making up our minds to let each other’s work alone?”