Winnie Conant said simply: “It’s on account of her marriage.” Winnie wrote juveniles. She had the lightness of fancy that children adored. She had no children of her own, did not want them, and in fact had no use for the budding mind. But with those who had never met her she was a by-word for her sweet motherliness. She lived with her husband, Addis Wickersham, in Macdougal Alley--why, no one knew, but we suspected that Addis had nowhere else found a library sufficiently vast for his books. “You know how Eva comes into a room--gorgeously dressed when she knows it isn’t a formal party?” I argued that she had always done this; her marriage could have worked differences, but her love of fine raiment was her own. “She dresses for her own satisfaction; she takes a narcissus-like joy in being a picture.” Winnie’s surprise at this was genuine. “I hadn’t expected you to be the one to call her a narcissist. Well, anyway, the effect of her entrances is more shattering than ever now she has her husband at heel. And how on earth can we talk, when he’s around? I’ll just tell you: you might as well see how things are going; and one party that that man’s presence spoils is like any other that he puts an end to. They don’t live so far from us, and every now and then they drop in after dinner. There are people at our place, usually, as you may remember. Well, anyway, one evening Eva sailed in looking like a Botticelli virgin in cloth-of-gold. Only--she was brittle. You know how she gets? She gives the impression, when in that mood, of choosing her words with care--as if they were going to the printer. Her husband followed her in; and he was laughing. It’s unusual, to catch Nicholas Van Suydam enjoying a good laugh when he’s with any of us. He wasn’t dressed, by the way; said she’d taken him by surprise with her ball costume. And, Dinah, doesn’t that one thing show how little he knows her? Anyway, she told me what he had said on the way to us. You know, of course, that if you get Eva at the right moment there’s nothing she won’t tell? He had reminded her that these studios used to be the stables belonging to his mother’s neighbours. And she had said it had atmosphere. He had come back at her with the reminder that that stiff and starched old coachman of his mother’s lives above his mother’s stable, which, as it happens, is two doors from us in the Alley. And, she said, she stamped her foot at him and remarked that he couldn’t make her lose her temper, because she simply adored his mother’s old-fashioned ways. She said that the old lady is a real literary character. ‘Good lord!’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. Eva actually does admire that old woman. She said to him that his mother was a literary remains, that she had never seen anything like her, that she was an anachronism. She wound up by thanking her stars that she’d found such a thing in New York, of all places. And that’s when he again rolled his eyes and said ‘Good lord! She _is_ New York!’”