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.