Miss Augusta rolled a vigorous eye around the circle of her cronies. She settled firmly in her chair, her feet together in the correct dancing attitude of her youth; she could have instantly risen without undue effort, and she could then have charged forward, or retreated, in full command of her body. “I am very fond of young people,” she began her lecture, “and I don’t at all mind giving much of my time to the solution of their problems.” She was so intently marshalling her as yet unspoken sentences, and the others were so keenly waiting for a chance to stop her off, that it was easy to speak in an aside to Eva. I touched her arm. Remembering what she had told me of a previous tea-party in this room, meeting her eye which gleamed with her own memory of that conversation and this present substantiation of it, I argued with her: “I see no reason for staying. Do come away? Why should you subject yourself to unpleasantness?” Eva said: “Nonsense! Nick’s mother is never unpleasant. We are staying, old girl, and you might as well resign yourself to it.” I urged my point, however. “Did you ever talk to her--really talk to her?” It seemed to me that the face Mrs. Van Suydam at this moment turned towards Eva was as closed as the room. This elderly and colourless face was not forbidding so much as it was casually but totally withdrawn from recognition of anything between herself and her son’s wife. I recalled her manner towards her daughter-in-law at the Glidden party a year ago. In deciding for herself a matter that she held to be solely her own affair Eva had brought down on her head an avalanche that as yet she did not even instinctively feel. Mrs. Van Suydam enquired: “You wished to speak to me, you say?” Her courtesy was so complete as to be in itself a barrier. Eva said: “Very much. I knew, as I came in sight of the house, that I must talk to you.” Her smile was a lovely thing. And I noticed again how easily she believed in the devotion of others.