I contrived to get Eva off. “Keep quiet,” I admonished her. “They are joking, and you aren’t.” She was far from joking. The eyes that she turned on me were haggard. For herself, there was no hope, she said to me. Nicholas had impregnated the little house in Eleventh Street; and for her the essence of the big house in Washington Square had got over all New York. She assured me--and I feared that others overheard--that there was no hope of escape from the exigencies of life. Even in this room, the effect of the high notes of women’s voices was shocking. We went back to our corner. “What’s the matter?” enquired a woman, pausing in her run past to pry into silence. “What’s the matter with you?” Her sharp eyes bored. “Here you are looking broken down--absolutely broken down!--at the end of every season! Are you sure you can still stand the pace? I certainly think you’re looking--well, fagged.” And she left, up in the air but lively in their inferences, more devastating terms than fagged. “You really should take more care of yourself. You’ll be going off in your looks.” Her inflexion said that already this had come about. I was pleased to notice that the woman’s spitefulness had roused Eva. She positively hissed: “The viper! Dinah, for God’s sake get off your foot! You can’t imagine how it annoys me, that you always sit on one foot. Someone told me she said I had the childlike vanity of all artists, and had to be praised in order to exist; and now she comes out with that vixenish thing, and the inference is plain, I think, don’t you, Dinah? She means to do all she can to kill my work. Well, she won’t be able to, I can tell you!” Instantly she was filled with a calm security about her work. The recent rebellious surge of false energy gave way to her icy judgment of values, her correct estimate of what she could do. Inspired by the unpleasantness of this encounter, she began telling me that she saw, as on a stage, the immense fatigue of people who, having no repose in their restless hearts, no real happiness in their homes, continued to tread the measure for all of every winter season. And as I laughed at her inconsistency, she cried with delight: “It’s a line of thought for a future novel! Have human beings always trod the measure, do you suppose, Dinah?” And she went over and over the idea so that she might not forget it before getting back to her writing-table. Instantly, she was the author pursuing words in which to clothe her thought; she was a novelist, an observer, a connotator, and had not herself suffered the pangs of which she would write. She began planning: “It must be a modern dance of life, as opposed to the dance of death of that old bridge in Switzerland--you remember, Dinah? You must have seen it, when you were taken to see the sights upon your first trip to Europe?”