Molly smiled languishingly up at him. “How long have you been leaning over the back of the sofa?” “Not long enough to hear much,” he reassured her. “Do finish it? You were going to say----?” “I was telling Dinah a lot of fibs because she is simple enough to believe me.” She rose and sauntered off, swaying her hips. Pomeroy said to me: “She’s a frustrated victim of her early environment. She’s afraid she will die in the state of grace that her mother would wish for her. She will be mortified when she faces God.” I bewailed myself: “We’re vultures, aren’t we? We pick bones. I’m sick of it--sometimes.” “Dinah--darling!” said Pomeroy. “Don’t allow yourself to become a virago.” All around us, talk was served in tantalizing tidbits. Robed like a vampire from some unconscious wish, Florence Quincy stood, with wispy grey draperies flattened against the wall, moodily observing because she lacked the desire that at this moment would have thrown her into something. Her face in repose was never cheerful. We had always fallen short in guessing what she was after. Pomeroy said to me: “It’s simple to guess what Molly Underhill is after: she’s after a load of sin.” He continued buzzing in my ear. But in my ear others buzzed. “I myself shall try Africa next,” said Justo Zermonte. “The only thing one cannot find in New York is a Negro at home.” Someone busily took down notes: I heard the scratching of a pencil. “You don’t object if I use that in my column, do you? No one else has thought to say it.” Molly Underhill huddled in a distant corner with one of her youthful admirers. She made me uneasy. But Pomeroy said: “She can’t harm them, and they can’t harm her.” A young Jew flung himself at the piano and played the “Rhapsody in Blue”; his face, fiercely intent, wretched, worn, was removed, by his music, from the people in the room. His fingers drew, through the piano, all that was pent up in us. Thwarted passions, disillusioned passions, passions that had leapt the fence: what did it matter, when the result was suffering? I was softened in my judgments by the “Rhapsody in Blue.” I enquired of Pomeroy if conventions had come out of God’s way, or if God were Himself the product of conventions. “Dearest!” said Pomeroy, putting up his eyeglass to look me over. “Don’t be silly.” I said to myself: “I won’t talk. I won’t speak another word from the real inside.” And at once I said to Florence Quincy: “I’ve been working it out--what we all need; and it looks as if it of course has to turn us into hell cats--if we do it.” “We are hell cats anyhow,” said Florence. “But what do you mean?” I thought of Eva. “In order to do creative work one must have--and preserve at all costs, even to acting as a slow poison on those who come in contact with us--the heart of fire and the brain of ice. That’s the working combination.”