She threw her head back and laughed. I saw her long throat rippling with mirth. “We shall come to that later. I want to tell you how inconsistent Nick was about what he calls my love of money. Dinah, he has never been poor; he doesn’t know what it is to want to be certain that one will never again be poor. I knew what was the matter with him, although he didn’t know what was the matter with me. He had to have an interval in which to again enclose against me all of his mother’s scorn, all of his mother’s resentment, of the blatant wealth of the present New York. Oh, yes: I’ve been studying Nick, as I would study a character for a novel: there is every reason, now, why I should understand all his quirks and fancies. Not for the first time, he was wondering why I alone have the power to rouse him to this admiration of his mother’s tenets. And I saw his wonder, and his own--in spite of himself--resentment of me.” She looked worn and tired, and at the same time she looked deeply satisfied. Was it because she had finished her book? Was it because she had decided to understand her husband? She went on to say: “He can’t see how, when a book is at last finished, one is played out, fagged, and terribly glad.” I glanced suspiciously at her. “You are glad of something else,” I accused her. “What is it?” She burst out laughing; and I noticed, now, a different quality in her laughter; it lilted. “Well, then--if you will have it--I am going to have a child!” I sat staring, dumbly. “It was the last thing I expected,” she told me. There was no quiet in New York. I heard the noise of outdoors coming in on us--the windows open to it, and my nerves beginning to shriek on account of it. I thought that if there should be no noise, inside and outside of houses, I could more quickly take in what she had said: but the main thing, I felt, was what she in a moment would say. The Elevated roared and clanked, half a block away on Sixth Avenue. I cried: “How can anyone think, in New York? If it were just quieter, I could tell you what I feel about it, Eva.” I reflected. “And I could also try to get at how you feel about it.” “I am glad,” she said positively. “I should think you could tell.” “That’s what I was saying,” I returned. “There’s a numbness that drops on me, when the windows are open and noise pours in over me; and then I can neither think nor feel. But I do know that I am glad. I think it is the best thing for you.” She threw up her hands. She laughed, then, at herself and, I knew, at me. “You did say that as if you were an ancestor!”