I remembered the effect upon Eva of this trait in a man whose praise she very much wanted. We had dined at his apartment; and it was in the early days when she had been less certain of the reputation of her books: of their quality she had never experienced a doubt. The Glidden dinner table was always the quintessence of simplicity. Upon this occasion a single blossom, in a rare vase, leered insinuatingly from the centre of the board. “What is it?” we had asked, strangely attracted. He did not know, himself; he had thought it amusing. It might be, he speculated, the arrested product of an affair between an orchid and a tiger lily. Throughout the meal, the flower waved and nodded as if independent of any outside propulsion, amazingly giving the impression that from its calyx there burst its own ululation. Eva had become nervous and excited. She had sat at her host’s right, slim and shining, proud and rather rare; she might have had some remote kinship with the blossom that, slim and mocking, elevated its head above even the rarity of the vase that held it. Possibly Glidden had seen that his decoration and his guest of honour were in accord; he might have arranged it; his eyes stared with the same glassiness at Eva and at the flower. Eva whispered to me: “I am in terror of his silence! He is like a hooded falcon. I never know what he truly thinks of my books. Has he ever told you what he thinks of my work?” When I am nervous I suspect that I wear my hair too long; it falls over my forehead into my eyes, and I push at it and feel like swearing. “Ask him and see,” I suggested crossly. But she gasped that she was afraid to; she could not bear it, if he said he did not believe in her; and Spencer Mapes had said, a moment before--I knew she was trying to stop thinking about what Mapes had said, because she surmised that the important thing was what he had not said. Molly Underhill often bragged that we were a peculiar lot; and sometimes we were afraid of each other, sometimes we were indifferent to each other, but always we were aware of each other. Molly herself, while pronouncing upon us, wore a blush like an angry sunset, a blush that cast her mouth into such shadow that she appeared to have no lips. Speed being impossible on a New York street, I had time to brood, and laugh, over the agonies that we had lived through. “He’ll tell me nothing,” I promised myself.