I felt Eva’s hand slip into my arm. “Help me out? Help me out, Dinah, for the love of God? I can’t stand this!” At once she continued, speaking imperatively to her husband: “Some of us are going down to the Metcalfs’.” I heard him say in a low voice: “You’ve behaved like a wild thing all day.” She pulled away from his detaining hold. “Are you coming, too, Dinah?” He said: “Very well. I’ll drop you at the door. I shan’t go in. And let me say this, Eva: you’re being discourteous to our hostess, who doesn’t belong to the ‘union’.” She said for the second time, and indifferently: “Do as you please.” He told me, afterwards, that he hastened to undress and get into bed. He knew that this was to offset any weakening of his purpose, any qualm that might have urged him to hunt for Eva as she rushed through the homes of her friends. [Illustration] IV I saw Eva once again before the summer flight from New York set in for most of us. She went abroad with her husband, and I have always believed that this was the direct result of Winnie Conant’s party for women only. This party became famous as the Onion Party, and, we suspected, influenced the course of several lives. I stopped for Eva, and Nicholas walked with us to the studio in Macdougal Alley. That they had not, at this time, come to an agreement about what had been brewing between them was evident during this short stroll. We started around the corner into Fifth Avenue in a silence that was a thick wall between the two. Across the street, above the mass of a terraced apartment house, the crescent moon hung in a deep blue sky. Nicholas struck his stick against the trunk of a lone tree surviving at the kerb; and it struck him, with the sharpness of the blow he dealt the tree, that he had sold out his birthright: why had he selected a profession whose present aim was to change New York? Why had he not been content with what he had always known? Why had his taste wandered afield? All of this we gathered from what he said to us in his resentment of disillusion. Eva watched him, I fancied, with amusement. “What is it?” she enquired with her air of detached interest in the contortions of human beings. Promptly he informed us that the city was ruining us. Looking accusingly at his wife, he said directly to her: “It seems, of late years, to inculcate a love of money.” “Who doesn’t like money?” she asked flippantly. Her flippancy, as with everything about her, even her anger, was dainty; her sweep of eyebrow took a more airy flight, her small mouth was prim: it occurred to me that in this mood she was more than ever dangerous to the peace of mind of this man who acknowledged that he did not understand her. He said: “People--nice people--don’t openly bay down the trail after it.” She said: “Oh, don’t they!” He shut his lips down tight on a sentence that I was sure would have been “Not the kind of people to whom I’m accustomed.”