But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning--as if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to turn on--drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my conscience clear.” Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what, in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust--” as if discussing a prima donna’s husband--“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your going?” “What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had to talk over, Edgar?” Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?” he asked me. Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We left Edgar smiling like an impresario. “Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.” I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.” I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is outside my schedule.” She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see Nick’s mother.”