Eva said to me: “Men are the trouble, in this life.” Already her eyes were shining--because of Nicholas going home through the dark Alley, I made no doubt. Addis Wickersham--apologetic in manner because he said that he had only consented to serve one round of cocktails in order that his wife’s dreadful idea would go over--tried to detain us in talk; but Eva sailed past him and into the evolving matriarchy. She confided to me that she felt like a galleon, with treasure in her hold, because her frock was the prettiest in the room. To impress upon men her standing as an artist she would rely on the quality of her work, supplemented by her beauty; women could only be overwhelmed by clothes. She saw that these women were divided between amusement and irritation at the drama of her glorious entrance; but above the tumult in her mind the galleon which was Eva’s high heart sailed with this brave show of security on the land behind. But that she was in the grip of tumult I soon gathered by what she dragged me off into a corner to confide. “What happened at home before you left?” I pressed her. “How can you expect me to understand, properly to sympathize, or even to advise--as I do really make out that you wish me to do--if I’m not posted?” This I was never to know. She revolved in her mind--and in words to me--what she would say to Nicholas, how she could manage the problem of Nicholas, what part, in short, Nicholas could be permitted to play in her life; but if any act of his, any speech of his, had brought about a crisis she did not tell me. Upon her imagination there lay a suffocating weight. Freedom--freedom from the flesh: this was what she told me she must attain. As usual with her, when she began talking about her work she strove to lift herself out of her body. She cried: “You are free, Dinah! You are free!” And this envy of my unvalued freedom mingled with the invisible presence of Nicholas which flooded her body, and threw her into a frenzy of resentment against nature which had trapped her. She felt the flame of her desire to reach the top of her profession lick from her heart all love for Nicholas; and she justified this infidelity of the spirit by what she believed to be true, that never could her mind belong to a man, be obsessed by a man. She began to hate her body because it had been the lure for the attentions of men who would distract her mind.