I had hurried past with the scantiest of greetings. As I reached the door of the reception room, Molly’s voice rang out above the noise of the already large gathering; it was like the unpleasant voice of a peacock. I craned my head around the guests who now, a receding tide, flowed back into the corridor. In the centre of the room Molly sat enthroned; and behind her, on the piano, was the portrait bust of Nefertiti. The experienced serenity of the plaster head, and the strained expectancy of the living head, confronted me. Two pairs of women’s eyes, filled with something above me, below me, behind me, stared at me but did not see me. I was appalled. The invisible laid hands on me, pushing me back with those who fled to the corridor. The voices in the corridor were pitched against Molly’s voice in the reception room. And the indescribable tautness of the nerves that her speaking voice engendered, intensified by the pressure of this receding wave of our friends and our foes, combined with the effect produced upon me by the eyes of Nefertiti and Molly Underhill and blasted me. I felt the imminent snapping of all control; and in the light of this inner turmoil I saw how good a thing it was, on Eva’s part, to let go in a so-called burst of artistic temperament authorized, by popular consent, if one does it with conviction. With pure conviction, Eva almost sobbed: “I don’t see why I should be expected to bear it!” And in the reception room, in the indifferent presence of Nefertiti, Molly suffered purely. They had not listened to her poem, she wailed. I sank deeper in my chair in the penthouse: one’s friends could be hard to bear. Florence went on raging at Charles Glidden. “Do you blame Eva’s husband for leaving her in the lurch and going home?” “Oh--by the way--” gasped Winnie--“what made him do it?” She gave me a sharply suspicious glance. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Dinah knows.” I did. I remembered, in a series of sharp impressions, the horrid happenings of the tea-party. But I shook my head. From behind muffling velvet curtains there had sounded the clear sweet voice that never failed to act on Nicholas like a call. It had come like the song of some bird caught in a hen yard. Nicholas had listened, rapt: it was a lovely sound. So distinctly that I glanced in confusion at her husband, Eva had said: “In regard to my next book, Spence, I’m quite sure that the subject of passionate marriage can be so treated as to be without offense. I’ll put ecstasy into it. It should be treated as poetry and not as a study in flesh and blood.” I had hastened to say to Nicholas: “She never has her feet on the ground. Bear that in mind. She will write nothing raw. She dislikes bawdy words.” He had replied with profound disgust: “But in talking, she’d dissect the Almighty.”