Gertrude, who was watching me out of the tail of her eye, advanced tentatively: “Nick’s so fond of his mother. I heard him saying to Eva--at that same tea----” I shut my ears to what Nicholas had actually said in favour of what he should have said. Holding Eva’s arm, urging her forward, his own eyes without reservation in his complete reliance on his mother’s devotion, “See!” he must almost have boasted. “Here is my mother!” I had no doubt that what he said was “Hello! How did you get here?” This was what Gertrude quoted--maybe: I did not listen; she was incapable of reaching out beyond five-finger exercises. But she told me fairly: “Eva was lovely about it. She said to Nick ‘But she’s splendid! She’s splendid!’” It would have been a matter of indifference to Mrs. Van Suydam that Eva, seeming to shrink, to become in a moment blighted by this calculated inattention, had still fixed on the older woman eyes that expanded for a sight that charmed her. “Did Mrs. Van Suydam look at Eva through that _lorgnette_?” I asked. Gertrude’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?” I knew that she would have put up her _lorgnette_ that she might not be scorched by the flame of an approaching passion. I said: “Ah poor Eva!” Behind those glasses, narrowly but covertly, she would have inspected Eva. But on Eva’s bloodless little face, in her clear eyes, there would have been no flame; there would have been, as always under a challenge, only assertion of herself, only belief in herself. I was, suddenly, very wearied and said firmly: “This is a footless discussion. And here’s my street. Goodbye.” I extended a resolute hand and marched down a side street. But floating helplessly after me came Gertrude Cuyler’s pleading voice: “Won’t you do something about it?” [Illustration] III Florence Quincy was a tall woman so blonde as to be almost albino. She had a large mouth which she made up to suggest danger; it became, under her lavish use of vermilion lip-stick, a fixed and sullen sneer. She wound her flaxen hair closely, and even in the house she usually wore a turban, also closely wound. These turbans ranged from the richest materials to her beige stockings, which one day we caught her twining and pinning into shape. “Nothing else in the place that exactly matched the shade of my frock,” she explained. Her eyes were greenish and grey and almost blue. The amusing negroid suggestion of her features lay in a certain drooping heaviness, and was contradicted by a positive hint of the equine. She had--in short--a face that could not be easily forgotten.