Together we went the few remaining yards and she opened the door with her latchkey. I knew that she hoped she would not see Nicholas. But he came down at once. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking closely at her. The policeman had been kinder. She averted her tear-stained face. Like a frightened child, she held my hand. “Nothing. Nothing you would understand.” “I never saw you look this way----” he speculated. She threw herself face down on the day-bed and cried out that she must be saved from her friends. Nicholas stood looking down on her. If she had glanced up, and so seen his smile, she would have recognized--behind the smile, where she might never again see it--that quality the absence of which in him she had deplored: irony, newly born to console him. [Illustration] V New York in summer is the ideal place to work in; when once hot weather has dropped on this spit of land the hardiest offenders stop giving parties. Office workers who traverse the streets because they cannot avoid it hold their hats in their hands and companion women whose skimpy frocks expose blistered shoulders. Asphalt menders take possession, and the pungent smell of hot tar mingles with smells more intimate to the inhabitants. Close over the sweltering city comes down a roof of brass. The summer of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine found New York preparing to pay the piper, although no premonition of the end of a great orgy had as yet got in the air. I finished my book, and hung over the parapet of my terrace and watched the antics of aviators who always seem care-free and who are known to be above suffering from the heat, and wondered if Eva and Nicholas had arrived at a better understanding. September set in with its usual recrudescence of a frazzled mid-summer, and what plants were still in window-boxes lay down and died gracelessly. The sound of Eva’s voice over the telephone--high, sweet, and, I noticed, in some way that I did not fathom very happy--was one of the most irritating things that could have happened. She announced their return at an unexpectedly early date and demanded my immediate appearance at her house. There was nothing I wanted less to do. My curiosity was like the plants in the window-boxes, dead or dying and not caring to pick up. I wanted to go somewhere and tell my own troubles. This bright and terrible day was not the curse which would have been hurled by high heaven at a dancer, let us say, or a singer. Only to a novelist, cooped up all day and every day, would the sun have seemed so personally vengeful. “Well,” I said to Eva, “I’m glad you are back, and all that: consider it said: but what in the name of peace have you to tell that could not have waited for a more merciful day?”