She turned upon me eyes that failed to see beyond her own concerns. “When you come down here and bother me with doleful prognostications about things that don’t affect you and me, Dinah, you get me out of sorts. Don’t be ‘sensible’, will you? You’ll spoil your work if you develop executive ability. Nick’s that way.” She gave me her little impish grin; her half-smile with its implications was for other moods. “Spencer Mapes says that Nick has sense while I have sensibility.” Blaming her for her failure to throw herself into my mood, I now failed to follow her lead to lightness. “I knew, all along, that the outrageous summer before last was an omen. Eva, the brassy sky was a warning!” She displayed sincere astonishment. “Of what?” I had, in reply to this, only the small rejoinder: “The stock market crash.” She remarked, practically, that as neither of us had had money in it we need not think about it. “If you had the things to worry you that I have,” she went on, “then I would sympathize, my dear. But as it is--I have Nick’s work to worry me, if you want to know.” She complained that he had got little work of late, and she put it down to what she said she had all along suspected: the quality of his work had fallen off. “It’s not surprising,” she stated. “Look around you at these abortions of his trade.” She waved disdainfully at the modernity of lower Fifth Avenue. “How can anyone call these horrid things the result of talent?” She was, I had noticed, unimpressed by modern architecture; while it appalled me, it left her unshaken. She said, now, that she felt a desire to go to her mother-in-law’s house in Washington Square and rest her eyes. “I love it, there. One knows, when in that rarefied atmosphere of dried rose leaves, that nothing happens which can shake the world, Dinah. It might do you good to go. You let your nerves play you tricks.” And yet at this time New York was a city struggling with alarms. Even the staccato of steel construction was, or seemed to be, muted. It was a mild winter, enervating the optimism of those accustomed to bitter cold; and, with surprising ease, the citizens had dropped into one of the most pronounced cases of mass pessimism seen by a world that has seen a great many things. It would not have surprised the New Yorkers if their amazing new buildings had tumbled down. Under the influence of adversity, they had even begun to speculate on how much weight the rock of Manhattan could hold up without splitting, a contingency over which no thought had been wasted in the days of their prosperity. “Have you sensibility?” I wondered aloud.