Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Oh, I know that. I know that, Mrs. Avery. But then, you see, Nick is a friend of ours.”

I started to say “Then that should enable you to guess at the character of loyalty,” when, glancing at her, I saw that her blush had faded until her little freckles stood out, seeming to spring from her skin. The girl’s heart lay exposed before my eyes, which I considerately turned away. She said, speaking brightly: “Eva Litchfield is very beautiful.” Her lively tone was a weapon in her defense against me. I wanted to pat her shoulder, and remembered that her shoulder was on a level with the crown of my head and that compassion on tiptoes sports the blemish of inelegance. However, the suspicion that Gertrude Cuyler was pathetic had crept upon me, unawares, and it did no good to remember that Charles Glidden had said to me that I must look out for I was only moved by pathos, which is a weakness of the nerves and slides into bathos.

I bent upon her a strictly impersonal look and told her that beauty was not all of Eva Litchfield. “Besides, what is there about your friend, and my friend, that you should properly talk over with me?”

At this, she gasped that Mrs. Van Suydam was dreadfully worried.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

She said, on an even more dying note: “Eva is so attractive to men!”

During this interchange, Anthony Bloodgood had said not a word. He had marched purposefully along, and if he had glanced above my head at Gertrude I was not aware of it. He now, however, gave me the impression of mutely taking part in the conversation; for I was sure that he did not subscribe to Gertrude’s statement of Eva’s attraction. What was there of finer perception about Nicholas Van Suydam, that he could appreciate Eva Litchfield? Anthony walked with a stubborn set to his broad shoulders and a forward thrust to his powerful neck; and I wondered for how long Eva could stand opposed to this phalanx of the Van Suydams and their kin.

I advanced that I should like to know if Miss Cuyler knew what she was talking about; for how conceivably could she be sure that Mrs. Van Suydam was worried?

“Miss Ingoldsby is my aunt,” she said as if this explained the knottiest problems.

“I still don’t see----” I said. “I’m not, after all, a New Yorker.”

“My aunts are very intimate friends of Mrs. Van Suydam’s; they went to boarding school together, years and years ago,” she expounded as to an idiot. “She talks freely to my aunts. Who else is there for her to talk to about Eva?”

There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted--so, really, a maze of instinct--that it came as a shock to be again accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see, because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened voice.

“Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her, she became confused in her mental processes.

“She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment. “You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.”

I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw, for herself. “Oh, I--I----” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to do it.”

Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van Suydam--she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her--she wanted him to do as the old codgers had always done--settle down to manage the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his little moustache and took a long breath.

Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the island of Manhattan. Eva--and the rest of us--were trying to take root on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or was she forever against her son’s wife?

“How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly.

They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York was accepted by these condemnatory young people--and by their sisters and their cousins and perhaps their aunts--as natural, but it drove us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler.

“Why--no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or--I probably read it when I was a little girl.”

“You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that authors should stay at home. She will, of course--in this case.”

The Cuyler girl asked timidly if the Bible really said such a thing. She was losing the thread of what she had set out to say to me. I could see her fighting to hold on. “All of you make such jokes,” she advanced.

“One must joke,” I threw out carelessly. Especially, I added in my mind, when one is beginning to understand. I cautioned myself: “Old girl, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to understand the two sides; for don’t you always drag in that there are two sides? There’s the side of Eva, and there’s the side of the Van Suydams: there’s the side of us, and there’s the side of New York. You might start--by way of a drastic change!--by understanding yourself. Why--for instance--are you about to be detestable to this good-natured young woman? Is it because you’re envious of her security? She gets that security from having always kept in touch with her home. You could have stayed at home; Eva could have stayed at home: your precious crowd could have stayed at home. Why didn’t you?” There we were: we were transplanted and sickly, and I was turning to bite the hand that fed me.

We paused at a street crossing, and the lights changed, and I felt Anthony Bloodgood’s hand at my elbow symbolically guiding me for the passage of the--Red Sea, I decided in despair: it had become vitally necessary that I laugh. Anthony looked down--very far down--to my face, and enquired solicitously: “Did I rush you too fast?”

“Yes!” I said. But it was the life that I had selected, and not Anthony Bloodgood, which was rushing me too fast. The Lord God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, back to the land from whence they had come. If one read the Bible when one was upset, it applied to the most modern of problems. An author takes colour from the land of his birth, but mainly, it seemed to me today, he derives from the land of his people the calm strength through which he is enabled to go on. I glanced at these two satisfied persons who, because they believed that nothing in the world was so good as New York, had never considered moving away.

Encouraged by my attention, Gertrude hurried on: “Eva has a way of saying to Nick ‘When I work, I work’.”

I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him? Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?” I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick. This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed, at myself and every friend I had in the world.

Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice and--and--yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better leave----”