Often his omniscience irritated me. “How can you know?”

“We all know,” he crowed over me. “It happened the day that you, in a spirit of mistaken decency, left a tea at the Savoy Plaza. Never, my dear Dinah, leave a splendid scene because of a feeling for what is right.”

“She seemed a tragic sight,” I put in as my excuse.

“Eva?” He was amused.

I shook my head. “The old lady. She was having a terrible time controlling herself, you know.”

“That’s what made it such a magnificent scene. Those old girls were taught self-control at the proper boarding schools. And when she sees fit she can defend herself. The old lady needs no help from the itinerant author. Oh, I’ve been hanging around her whenever I found an opportunity!” His laugh, seldom heard, was always startling; it was a high, whinnying laugh. “I assure you that she doesn’t feel a whit humbled in presence of our various names and fames. Her pleasure in identifying those of us whose photographs she’s seen appended to book reviews is almost sadistic. She’s long since recovered the balance that you feared to see her throw overboard. She seems to think that our pictures hadn’t prepared her for the truth. Once upon a time, when I was hanging on her words, she said loftily: ‘And who, pray, is that strange woman with a face like a mask?’ She graciously assisted me in identifying the lady with ‘Ah I don’t wonder you are at a loss! They all wear masks, these celebrities.’ The term she so derisively threw at us seemed to taste bad; only her famous self-control prevented her making a face. She was, at the time, attentively regarding a pale poet who looked, if the truth must be told, half drowned, and at Molly Underhill who has, as we know, an eye that is lewd in its open questing. She said ‘Humph! Indeed! All diseased, I fear. It is a disease, this writing of books.’ You’ll notice that she seldom abbreviates her words. There’s nothing slovenly about her.”

The woman with a face like a mask must have been Florence Quincy, I said. Interested in oddities in others, she was herself strange in appearance.

He recovered from the devastation of a fit of laughter and went on with his dissection of Mrs. Van Suydam. “She said to me ‘And which of these ladies and gentlemen are my son’s especial friends?’ This being soon after the marriage I was at a loss: for who among us knew much about him? Who among us, even now, knows much about him? We really agree with Mrs. Van Suydam, who didn’t then, and doesn’t now, recognize a possible bridge between her family and the artists who make the toys with which Van Suydams amuse themselves when so minded. You realize that she must have had some definite plans for her son--that she must have followed the best lines of the dowager tradition and picked out a wife for him? She wanted Gertrude Cuyler, who’s wholesomely without talents, to marry Nicholas. The Cuyler girl was the woman whose eventual stepping into her shoes she could have borne with equanimity. But I hear that his objection to Gertrude was that she insisted too strenuously on the fact of her never feeling ill; while, he is reported to have said, he didn’t admire sickly women, there was a happy mean between bouncing health and a lady’s delicately tenacious hold on life.”

Gertrude Cuyler had never interested us. She laughed too much; and when she laughed her mouth, stretching widely, still failed to suggest true mirth. About this girl who had sighed, at the tea two years ago, there was no hint of mirth, although her frequent laughter showed her to be conscience-stricken by its absence. She was a tall girl with russet hair and the pale skin of the red-headed woman; and over her face there was the warmth of sunshine, and when one looked closely the sunshine was an overlay of small golden freckles. As Glidden had remarked, she was wholesome.

“I mentioned her,” whispered Glidden, “because she happens to be sitting a few tables away.”

Over the shoulder of the man with her, she eyed me. Before the day was over, I was to feel sorry for Gertrude Cuyler. But at the time I glowered because she was only a few tables away.

“Women are so amazing. They know when they’re being talked about--with the exception of Eva,” he amended it. “Eva is sublimely oblivious--most of the time. It’s so lovely to watch a person who is sublimely oblivious.”

Plaintively I begged that he make one plain statement of fact: how did Mrs. Van Suydam feel about her son having married Eva Litchfield?

“You’re so literal!” he lamented. “I’m sure that if Eva hadn’t been the subject of open gossip she would have seemed ordinary to Mrs. Van Suydam; she would have been no more than a very pretty woman whom her son had ‘picked up’ and fallen in love with--foolishly but understandably. But Eva had been ‘talked about’; she was a woman who could, therefore, smear an impious finger over the fair name of the Van Suydams, and the old lady got the wind up. I think she came uptown to that tea, where she knew her son would be and where she suspected Eva would be, in order to bear him off in triumph. It didn’t occur to her that she could fail.”

Here was the clear impression. Mrs. Van Suydam had set out to play her first, and last, card. She would pluck the young man from his circling flight in ether only slightly above, and in sight of, his home; she would bear him off on the rush of her victory. The drive back down Fifth Avenue would be her triumphal progress with the son of her house safe at her side. But as she sat on the sofa at the tea-party could she banish all doubts? Underneath the noise of high chatter there must have flowed for her, rapidly, darkly, the stream of impending defeat. I asked--but already I knew the answer: “She took her son home?”

Charles Glidden smiled. “Didn’t you get the idea? He refused to go with her. He stayed behind to ask Eva Litchfield to marry him. That’s the point, don’t you see?”

II

As I turned the corner into Park Avenue Gertrude Cuyler caught up with me. She was accompanied by the gay Anthony Bloodgood. He had been the man, I saw now, over whose shoulder she had peeped at me in the restaurant a moment since.

“Mrs. Avery,” Gertrude almost gasped, as if she had been running, “you don’t object if we walk along with you? I tried to leave at the same time so that I might have a chance to talk with you,” she explained with her determined honesty. She dropped into step as well as she could with the difference in our heights. In walking she came down heavily, leaning forward as though on the alert to control her feet, and when she stopped it was with almost a dislocation of her body: decidedly, a girl who would be at her best when middle age justified slow dignity.

I glanced up at Anthony Bloodgood and met his embarrassed eyes. He was twisting the ends of his moustache. Gertrude, too, was confused; that she was about to lose her way on a path that she nevertheless chose to follow was revealed by a heavy flush which added nothing to her somewhat robust good looks. I realized that they were bent on talking about Eva’s marriage, and that Anthony at least would never acknowledge that this was by design. He strolled along with his easy grace, in the fashion of young men who from the nursery have been fed and clothed, exercised and mildly entertained, by rule; only his uneasy eyes gave him away. Walking, therefore, between two painfully self-conscious persons, I tried to be jaunty about it, a difficult part to play towards flanking superiority in height.

In the tiny triangle exposed between the edges of a fur coat and a bright scarf, Gertrude’s throat showed convulsed: like an adolescent, she tried to swallow her agitation. She said, pitching herself into speech and being, as always, devastating: “I don’t want you to think we eavesdropped.”

“Eavesdropped?”

“You both spoke loudly,” she explained.

Of course we had; all of us did, becoming more animated as we agreed or disagreed more definitely. I smiled; had she been imaginative, always we must have reminded her of a mob scene on the stage; we must have seemed without direction, to be getting nowhere and, in truth, to be indifferent where we might eventually bring up.

“I know most of you. And naturally I knew what you were talking about,” said Gertrude. And vaguely she fell upon another point. “I don’t know how any of you talk at home.” Her voice was uneasy, and a little shocked. We must have given her an impression of strain, of frustration, of dissatisfaction because of constant striving, of a profound unhappiness because within us she detected no repose--with her, the basis of all happiness. The thing before her must have seemed to be energy engendered by the activity itself, and she would have been very nearly right.

Her nearness to hitting it made my smile sarcastic. “I’m so sorry that I must leave you here. I have some shopping to do.”

She was surprised. She opened her eyes widely. “But I thought we would have a talk, because I heard you say to Mr. Glidden that you were going to walk across to Sutton Place.”

This made me laugh, and I said more amiably: “The truth is, I don’t wish to discuss Eva Litchfield, who is a friend of mine.”