“Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the breath.

She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony that we had better go----”

Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.”

“I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?”

“He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep disgust.

“She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded.

Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear a word you say.”

“She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature of mist and cobwebs, an--” I hesitated before their blankness--“an enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells bring about.”

Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”

“I wasn’t here,” I said drily; “but presumably she was in love with him.”

I knew that this time they did look at each other over my head. I heard them breathe their doubt. Anthony brought up a feature that he assured me would drive any man mad: she was not consistent. He had been in Nicholas’ own workroom, he told me, sitting idly by while another man discussed points of architecture with their host. Anthony acknowledged to having been bored, and floundering out of his depth which, he said, was not in the line of architecture; but men respected each other’s work, and he had of course kept quiet until they settled whatever had come up. But Eva had opened the door and had stood there until they were forced to look up from the plans spread out before them. Was that nice of her, he asked me: was that as she would be done by?

I remarked that she might have wanted to see him about something that could not wait. I added the nugget, for Gertrude to seize, that Eva had much ado to keep out of the way of men’s admiration; she had had, I explained, to fight for the time in which to work.

“Now, Mrs. Avery--” Anthony began to explain--“I didn’t mean-- Of course she had something to see him about. She told Nick that the Wickershams had telephoned for them to come around after dinner and talk.”

I looked sharply at him. But his face was blank. Tugging at his little moustache, he gazed down on me with honest good nature. “Oh, well! What then?”

He resumed: “Nick said ‘Why?’ I wish you could have seen how surprised she was! ‘To talk, of course,’ she said. And he said ‘What’s the use of that?’ And that was when I fancied that Gertie was right and that they were about to blow up. The funny thing is, that you can understand every word she says when she’s rattling like machine gun fire. She began to say, over and over like a mechanical doll, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ She told him flatly that she was a public character and owed a duty to society--to show up, I took it she meant. And she called poor old Nick’s attention to the fact that it didn’t matter whether or not he showed up in public, because no one knew who put up a building.”

“Where was the other man while this went on?” I wanted to know. The other man had taken a hasty departure. Then, I remarked, they should have followed his excellent example.

He stopped pulling his moustache. He explained lamely that he had feared such a course would dignify the scene into a serious affair. “A sort of reflection on Eva,” he concluded.

“Oh, nonsense!” I cried. “What is the matter with you people? Is he to be allowed to say what he pleases and she to be muzzled?”

The rock of Manhattan reared itself between us. “You don’t understand, then,” he said. He left it at that.

Gertrude took it up where he left it. “She is so fond of parties,” she criticized.

I said: “Now, look here--be reasonable. Be fair--if you can, to Eva. Aren’t you fond of parties?”

Gertrude reverted to her mother’s time. “She’s married!” She was stolidly virtuous over it, but she came back to what personally she turned the flat of her hand against. “And Nick is bored to death at those literary teas.”

I snapped: “How do you know he is?”

She stammered that she went to these teas herself, when invited. I saw that she went to look at Nicholas who went to look at Eva. I sighed for Eva: the phalanx was unbroken. She pretended to be drawn off the subject by one of our necessary ventures at street intersections, and I could not decide whether her immediate return to it was bravery or the tenacity which would finally dash out her moth life. She stated: “Nick detests the sort of person who hangs around Eva at those parties.”

“Aha!” I sniffed. “Considering that they are distinguished men and women----”

Pushed into a corner, she brought out what she had been driving at during the length of our stroll. “He dislikes Spencer Mapes.”

“He tells you these things against his wife?”

She was quick in his defense. “His mother told me. At the tea--you were talking about the tea at luncheon, Mrs. Avery--his mother saw Mr. Mapes for the first time; and I’m sure she has never stopped worrying about him since. Tony was looking for Nick--although he wasn’t really looking because we knew that he and Eva were talking. And Mrs. Van Suydam said to me ‘Who is that youngish man with the dark face who seems to be in expectation of something from the room beyond?’” She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Mr. Mapes was waiting for Eva. Everyone knew that, except Mrs. Van Suydam.”

I saw the implacable lady sitting on her sofa without the feminine relief of tapping her foot on the floor and speculating about Spencer Mapes as he waited for Eva and Nicholas, saying to her heart that it was far-fetched to believe that he waited for Nicholas but knowing in spite of herself that he waited for something inimical to Nicholas. She must have said to herself: “But this is an enemy!” And she probably said aloud, surprised that the incident of discovering him had affected her voice: “Who is that?” She would have given full weight to each of her three words. Gertrude Cuyler was without the dramatic sense, and had used a more involved phraseology than Mrs. Van Suydam under the circumstances would have employed.

I regarded Gertrude with a quickened interest: was love, then, such a stimulus that she was becoming perceptive? For she said now: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Avery, for repeating it--but Mrs. Van Suydam said something else. She said that she had always fancied artists were weak creatures, and that she was now afraid that Nick was weaker than his new friends. This was what frightened her, I suspect.” But her thoughts becoming confused, she gave her little gasp and started again. “She said that in Eva’s friends she seemed to have discovered a toughness of fibre, a tenacity of aim, and the will to succeed. This was what frightened her, I think,” she wound up.

Anthony Bloodgood was surprised. He expostulated with Gertrude: “I didn’t know she felt that way about that bounder Mapes. How could he affect her? It seemed to me that it was Eva who knocked her breath out. I remember I came up and told her that Nick was coming. I explained that he hadn’t known she was there because he was talking to Eva Litchfield. And she looked dashed, to me. I mean, the name, Eva Litchfield, seemed to do something to her. I give you my word, she almost jumped!”

They disputed above my head, leaving me free to do the thing that all along I had known I would do: I began attributing to Mrs. Van Suydam those reactions that she should have felt and that I was sure she had felt in the depths of her bosom so decently restricted by its buckram and black silk. The name, Eva Litchfield, tolling in her head when the young man had ceased speaking, must have drawn together into a design all her premonitions of disaster. This triumphant name took possession of her imagination, seemed, at once, to become part of her life because it menaced her son. So strong must this feeling have been--so swayed by it must she instantly have become--that the garish reception rooms might have darkened. I was sure that she felt old, and helpless, in face of this victorious name. She must have closed her eyes, in her temporary weakness, before opening them to gaze profoundly at her son. In my game of visualizing this fragmentary story, I said to myself: What a gorgeous scene! In her son’s bright blue eyes she must have seen what she had always seen in their sparkling depths, belief that life would be good to him. Sure that his mother adored him--sure that the girl walking beside him was the most exquisite creature in the world--convinced, as every man has been convinced at one time, that the two women he loved would love each other--Nicholas must almost have hurried in his eagerness to bring them together. But his mother’s mind, leaping beyond this appeal, fastened upon Spencer Mapes’ looming fixed regard. She sat, therefore, upon her sofa composed to all outward seeming, smiling at her son and his companion and meeting the eyes of neither; for she was engaged in her duel with Spencer Mapes.