Her mouth stretched like a wound. “I don’t think it; I know it. But I shall stay, as all of us will stay.” We were soap-bubbles, blown forward by winds that reached New York: no balance because we brought with us no weight of soil: no direction beyond that of the winds blowing towards New York: “You think that, too, Florence?” Florence’s mirthless smile dominated us. “I think a lot of things, and the trouble is that my point of view shifts. I think a different thing each time I speak of it. What a crazy mess! No conviction about any of us--except in the case of Eva. She, God knows, has the supreme conviction--about herself. And she doesn’t let us forget it. A conviction as strong as hers must be uncomfortable to live with. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise to find myself sorry for the poor wretch who married her.” I sighed with exasperation. “I’d give a lot to know what you really think. After all, I am trying to form a conclusion.” Florence’s dead white face, which by right should have revealed no emotion and which hung out like a flag every twinge of her heart, now set into her noncommittal smile of a wry amusement that she would share with no one. “Look out, Dinah! You are going to be let down. Eva hasn’t a ‘story’ because her life has always been higgledy-piggledy.” I realized that she had discovered something on me only to discount it, and laughed. But for a moment, peering out from behind her powder, there was her complete disillusionment. “Oh, yes, my dear! I did say that she, of us all, has conviction and knows where she’s going; and still I say that her life is higgledy-piggledy. Work it out, darling!” [Illustration] IV I left Florence Quincy’s cautioning myself that i had come back to do a particular thing: the particular book was planned and waiting for tranquillity in order to be written. But already New York pounded on the door of my mind. New York teased that tomorrow would be time enough for work; today, if I knew what was what, should be given up to talk. And talk--until I had heard all that they had to say--would consist of fragmentary information about Eva Litchfield’s marriage. I had growled to Florence that I wondered why I had come back; and she had jeered that we had come here of our own free will, and that we all came back and would try to come back from the grave. It was true. New York is a contagious disease. I hurried home to be ready when Molly Underhill should call for me.