It was seven years now since I had seen the city or Pauline, the only friend I had made there who could be supposed to take an interest in my coming again. I meant of course to see Pauline; we had kept up a correspondence which with the years had shown a disposition to confine itself to a Christmas reminder, and an occasional marked copy of a magazine, but I meant, of course, to see her. I had trusted to her finding out through the newspapers that I would be there and on such a date. It fell in quite naturally with my inclination, to have her card sent up to me the next morning a little after eleven. I was needing to be distracted. On my way up from breakfast I had met Jerry going down with his suit case. "Back to New York," he admitted to my question, "as quick as I can get there." "But with all this success ... why, they fairly stood on their feet last night." "I know, I know," he looked unendurably harassed. "I can't stand it, Olivia, I can't stand it. This place is full of ghosts." I remembered that both his children had been born there and that he had not seem them for more than a year, and I did not press him. "I'll keep your end up for a week if I can," I assured him as he wrung my hand. He turned back when he was a step or two down the stair. "Don't stay too long yourself," he admonished. "New York's the place." I was feeling that when Pauline came to me. It wasn't until I saw her that I realized what a distance there was--in spite of our common youth, had always been--between us. It started out for us both in the first glimpse we had of one another, in the witness in all the inconsiderable elements of line and colour which go to make up a woman's appearance, of growth and amplitude in me and fulfilment in hers. Pauline had been in her girlhood, if not pretty, at least what is known as an attractive girl, and though there was only a matter of months between us, it came to me with a shock that she was now, not only not particularly attractive, but middle-aged. It was not so much in the fulness under her chin which apparently caused her no uneasiness, nor in the thickness of her waist, of which I was sure she made a virtue, but in the certainty that all that was ever to happen to her in the way of illuminating and self-forgetting passion, had already happened.