I said to myself: “Dinah Avery, my good woman, you had best furbish your own ideas--your recollections--before swimming out to sea. For swim out to sea you must, and will, before the day is over.” From the thirtieth-floor windows of my small apartment I looked at the sky-line whose fame was flashing around the world and was physically shocked: had corresponding changes taken place in my friends? With that sky-line assaulting my nerves it required no wide digression to speculate about Eva’s husband: he was one of the rising young architects of the city, and that the steel ribs of one or more monsters had been plucked from the side of this Adam was probable. I recalled him as a handsome man who lacked hardness of fibre. How could he bring about a drastic change in Eva? Life failed to scratch the surface of her absorption in her work. Her experiences were of the soul and not of the body. She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astounded, but no physical impression would have been made on her; she would still show to the world, and even to those friends in her confidence, a face almost nun-like in its essential purity. No man could hurt Eva for all time, I reflected comfortably: and at once I recalled the comment made on her by the caricaturist, Justo Zermonte. Zermonte had said without apology what many men had suspected but hesitated to acknowledge: Eva was a crystal, and a blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her. As usual when she was being discussed, Spencer Mapes the essayist had been eager; he had an insect-like persistence in stinging; but he might have been as impersonally curious as Zermonte when he asked: “Where would that blow have to strike--the shattering blow, I mean?” According to a trick of his, Zermonte was sketching on the back of a menu card and did not lift his eyes. He shrugged. Those human beings whose lines of cleavage had been struck the shattering blow were more vulnerable to caricature, and therefore more interesting to him, than the unbroken Eva Litchfield; he could not understand the writer’s desire to peel off the skins of the onion, for only the dreadful core was in his line. But Spencer Mapes of the literary mind continued to speculate; he seemed to buzz, when he so discussed his friends. “If the crystal were to be heated?” he suggested. Zermonte regretted that, not being a lapidary, he did not know. “I was wrong, of course,” Mapes kept at it. “A crystal can’t be heated.”