Eva cried in a sudden high excitement: “So you--and Nick--are trying with all your might to push me down to a question of that sort? I see what----” Mrs. Van Suydam continued as if she had not been interrupted. “From now on, you will find that my son feels for you the variety of love that a man thinks he feels for his mistress.” The wealth of disdain which she contrived to inject into this sentence was in its way a masterpiece. “I see what the question is: it’s whether I shall be harnessed! It’s whether I will submit to being harnessed! It’s whether I will meekly agree to demand no more chances than women had in the Middle Ages. I--to be no better than they!” The push of her clipped words made it a sheer impossibility to interrupt; I fancied that the elderly lady must be sitting aghast. “What do you think my friends would say, if you did this to me? What do you think would be the eventual verdict of the world, if Eva Litchfield were fetching and carrying and bearing children for the Van Suydams?” She laughed shortly. Mrs. Van Suydam then laughed also, shortly, almost viciously, with hatred. “It’s the choice that has always existed, you young fool: the choice between the women men marry and the women they make their mistresses.” I was enthralled by this contrast between the exaggerations of the generations at war; and it occurred to me--and so amused me that I caught myself just before I chuckled--that Eva’s child, if she had had it, would have been hard put to it to discover a real right course which should also be diametrically opposed to his mother and at the same time his grandmother. The poor generations, on their hunt for novelty! I heard Eva’s rapid, light footsteps. In her stride up and down the room--up and down, caged--she was almost running, with frenzy. She flung at the elderly lady: “By your creed, the woman with brains is to give up, if she’s so unfortunate as to fall in love?” Mrs. Van Suydam’s words fell like drops of ice-water. “Those brains are designed to feed the brain of the unborn child.” “My God!” Eva whispered. And then again she gasped the two words. I could not tell whether she laughed, or whether what she considered the enormity of this had literally taken her breath away. Mrs. Van Suydam sat in an assured silence. In order not to break this silence by my own convulsive merriment, I turned and pressed my face to the window pane. I looked down on teaming life. The inevitable hurdy-gurdy of all home crises in New York ground out, gaily and inconsequentially, an Italian love song. The call of the bird to its mate, the man to his sweetheart: the duet to the child--the little bird. It was the Trinity that, behind me in the drawing-room, Mrs. Van Suydam tried to force on Eva. And I wondered, not for the first time, if these poor creatures who infested the Square, involved in a struggle to make both ends meet, knew profounder things than Eva.