She asked lightly why truly he had come back, and shrugged when he persisted that he had returned because he was responsible for her. “You won’t stay,” she dropped, with as much acidity in her tone as she ever employed. “You won’t stay, because you won’t approve of this party more than you did of the one you so charmingly left.” She shrugged again when he replied that he had every intention of staying until she took her departure in his company. “As you please,” she agreed. “But I want to say this to you: you can’t play fast and loose with me, Nick. I don’t permit my friends to do so. My friends, however, have never wished to treat me in a cavalier fashion.” With a nod that was almost one of dismissal, she strolled away. I hastened to say to him: “Have you thought about this room? It is packed, I’m feeling, with evil influences.” “The people in the room?” he enquired. “It’s--it’s--bad. The room itself. The city outside the room. Oh--the whole thing,” I finished lamely enough. But I started in again to keep both his mind and my own from Eva. “I go through this year after year, agreeing with everyone because it’s less troublesome than to hold opposite views. There’s so much talk, if one doesn’t agree.” “But there’s talk anyway, isn’t there?” he asked, his manner that of one who knew the answer. It was impossible to divert his attention from Eva; I saw them meet in the middle of the room. She seemed, in fact, to have been seeking him. “Suppose we go?” she urged. “I think there is going to be a scene.” He responded to her appeal with “Then I feel sure you will stay.” I heard her foot tapping on the floor. “I won’t make a laughing-stock of myself by hanging around you,” she flung at him, and turned on her heel and left him. The scene which she anticipated started in by being, as usual, purely a verbal one. I got out of it by retiring into the ell of the room and settling with a book. If Molly Underhill stood pat under baiting, or if she flung back at them, was none of my business. But she brought the scene over to me, as I would not go to meet it: she ran to my corner and threw herself down with such abandonment to her inner turmoil that the chair creaked. In a passion of resentment she said through clenched teeth: “That taunt!” She almost flung herself at me as she talked aloud although to herself. “When I remember that, when I came to New York, these were the people I wanted to impress----!” As spasmodically as she had flung herself down, she leapt from the chair, snatched her coat and ran from the apartment: we heard the thud of her feet as she hurried down the stairs. Nicholas Van Suydam said to several of us who stood stupidly looking at the door through which Molly had bolted: “She was crying. It seems a pity.” Winnie Conant jeered: “Molly’s trying to live in a protracted emotional crisis. She gloried in the recent unpleasantness. Save your pity until she needs it.”