“I must say,” remarked Molly as I stepped into her taxi, “that if I’d realized you had located in such an inaccessible place I’d never have come by for you. Do you realize that I’ve wandered for hours?” But the meter did not bear her out. “Now--” she leaned back, and put her feet up on the folding seat, and lit a cigarette--“now we’ll talk over Eva Litchfield’s affairs.” She paid no attention to my possibly antagonistic reaction; the talk was the thing. And with Molly talk was a matter of personalities. She prated on aesthetics and told the baldest facts. The grunt that she now gave might have come from the lurching of the taxi, but I wondered if she did not derive a porcine joy from rooting and snuffling into private lives. She had an uncanny way of reading minds which were being withheld from her. She said that she had a cold in her head. “Have you forgotten that no one can avoid colds in the head, in New York in the winter? It’s a feature of the brilliancy of the season.” Her nose was red. The clangour of the traffic and the clack of her voice served to bring home to me that in counting on preserving my acquired attitude of detachment I had reckoned without the tentacles which now tightened around me. During our progression through the streets, our hitching starts and violent halts, our series of back-breaking jolts--the experience, I was to rediscover, of getting anywhere in town--and during the resulting nervous exasperation over what no one can remedy since they have built this city, I might have been shaking, stretching, straining to encompass the changes into which by easy stages my friends had slipped without shock. She screamed persistent confidences above the din. Some of what she told me reached my ears and some escaped me, and it was only significant because it impressed me with the fact that I was again a member in good standing of a racket. I was not interested in what she told, for, in spite of her proposed plan of revelation in which she was to concentrate on Eva Litchfield, she told shattering details of the love life of persons with whom I had the barest acquaintance. And I had been away for so long that even the activities of my old friends had faded into the background of the trivial. But she finally got around to it: she always did. She asked if I had seen Eva during the past summer, which she had spent in Europe. I had not seen Eva since I had gone abroad. But it is not unethical to lie to another woman. I said--unnecessarily, for Eva was always shiningly beautiful: “She made a great sensation.” Molly’s eyes shifted, on this. “Then you must have seen that something was wrong? And what sort of sensation do you mean?” I said cheerfully: “Oh, in the way of her appearance, and also in the way of her books, which you must acknowledge one wouldn’t expect from so lovely a woman. London takes the position that they are fine enough to have been written by an ugly woman.”