Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.” She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed. “You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation. We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side. She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door. She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really and truly like--lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.” As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house. She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today it worried her. We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!” I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the last thing I shall do for you?” The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation; and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.” And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield, and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is, really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know--none better!--that she’s stupid.” Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.” I said: “It is so to me, also.”