“You’re so literal!” he lamented. “I’m sure that if Eva hadn’t been the subject of open gossip she would have seemed ordinary to Mrs. Van Suydam; she would have been no more than a very pretty woman whom her son had ‘picked up’ and fallen in love with--foolishly but understandably. But Eva had been ‘talked about’; she was a woman who could, therefore, smear an impious finger over the fair name of the Van Suydams, and the old lady got the wind up. I think she came uptown to that tea, where she knew her son would be and where she suspected Eva would be, in order to bear him off in triumph. It didn’t occur to her that she could fail.” Here was the clear impression. Mrs. Van Suydam had set out to play her first, and last, card. She would pluck the young man from his circling flight in ether only slightly above, and in sight of, his home; she would bear him off on the rush of her victory. The drive back down Fifth Avenue would be her triumphal progress with the son of her house safe at her side. But as she sat on the sofa at the tea-party could she banish all doubts? Underneath the noise of high chatter there must have flowed for her, rapidly, darkly, the stream of impending defeat. I asked--but already I knew the answer: “She took her son home?” Charles Glidden smiled. “Didn’t you get the idea? He refused to go with her. He stayed behind to ask Eva Litchfield to marry him. That’s the point, don’t you see?” [Illustration] II As I turned the corner into Park Avenue Gertrude Cuyler caught up with me. She was accompanied by the gay Anthony Bloodgood. He had been the man, I saw now, over whose shoulder she had peeped at me in the restaurant a moment since. “Mrs. Avery,” Gertrude almost gasped, as if she had been running, “you don’t object if we walk along with you? I tried to leave at the same time so that I might have a chance to talk with you,” she explained with her determined honesty. She dropped into step as well as she could with the difference in our heights. In walking she came down heavily, leaning forward as though on the alert to control her feet, and when she stopped it was with almost a dislocation of her body: decidedly, a girl who would be at her best when middle age justified slow dignity.