There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted--so, really, a maze of instinct--that it came as a shock to be again accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see, because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened voice. “Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her, she became confused in her mental processes. “She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment. “You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.” I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw, for herself. “Oh, I--I----” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to do it.” Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van Suydam--she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her--she wanted him to do as the old codgers had always done--settle down to manage the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his little moustache and took a long breath. Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the island of Manhattan. Eva--and the rest of us--were trying to take root on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or was she forever against her son’s wife? “How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly. They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York was accepted by these condemnatory young people--and by their sisters and their cousins and perhaps their aunts--as natural, but it drove us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler. “Why--no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or--I probably read it when I was a little girl.” “You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that authors should stay at home. She will, of course--in this case.”