The frantic American spirit of crowding into a day all that should be spread over a week caught me up and swept me out to be lost in a sea of controversial gossip. I found my time arranged for; I was to rush from one engagement to another without the necessary pauses in which to piece together my impressions of things told me. I was to lunch with Charles Glidden the novelist, in a “quiet little place where we can talk about Eva Litchfield’s married life.” I was to go to Sutton Place for cocktails with Florence Quincy the short-story writer, who would invite only a few people “so that we can talk about poor Eva’s fiasco.” In regard to Eva Litchfield, conditions in New York had not changed. From all sides would come allusions to her, stray information about her, acrimonious or friendly discussion of her. If she failed to set the pace in the sense alluded to by Molly Underhill, she set it in the way of arousing unflagging talk. She had, always, so set it. She was one of the women--lucky or unlucky, as one might consider them--who are discussed. I wished immensely to hear the latest arguments for and against her. I burned with curiosity, composed of friendship and of that prying interest of the novelist, to know the details of her marriage, which had taken place shortly after my departure for a stay of two years in France. Not having returned to New York for the purpose of finding out, today I realised that this was what I must find out. It became a piece of news that New York withheld only to drop on my head when I should be off my guard. The tales I was to hear would be partisan tales; the truth was the brick held in reserve. For, odious as I felt myself in wanting to know, I still feared to hear the truth. That I was promptly to hear everything else was left in no doubt; underlying the various invitations there was the projected weaving into a whole piece of those vicarious hints, those veiled prognostications, those omens of the future as read from the signposts of the immediate past, that our friends had left behind their occasional European travels. Authors do not write chatty letters to each other: they save their lucubrations for the printed work; and what they had dropped in the course of the necessarily hurried talk of casual encounters as we drifted anchorless had not exposed what might be the trouble between Eva Litchfield and Nicholas Van Suydam.