business, until you get at the bottom of this marriage. Don’t cavil at the right of others to do likewise.” Doubtless my expression as I so took myself to task led Spencer Mapes on to say: “You must really go at once to see her. She has one of those little red brick houses in West Eleventh Street just off Fifth Avenue: did you know?” I was surprised that she could afford a house. Her quality was too fine, too attenuated, to make of her a best seller. That the effulgently gifted Eva should live in a cramped apartment, under the almost sordid conditions with which the rest of us struggled, had always impressed us as an ironical twist of fate. Not that we consciously conceded these superior points to her; we did not, except in so far as we conceded the same to ourselves; but, looking back on the years that we had spent in New York--washed up on this beach from remote spots on the map of the country, brought together by our common interest in literature and held together by our fear of taking our eyes off each other’s development--our wish to succeed in juxtaposition with our desire for the other fellow to fail, or at the most to keep his distance a few paces in the rear--we all, I think, brought up points against Eva out of our conviction of her possession of every gift in the power of a fairy godmother to bestow. At least, so it seemed to me, this evening, standing looking intently and deceitfully into Spencer Mapes’ equally dissembling fixed stare. We had had a way of saying, or suggesting: “Oh, yes, she’s perfectly beautiful, and she writes like a seraph, but for God’s sake why does she do those things?” And Eva said of herself that she had not, at any rate, an immoral impulse; why then, she asked tragically, did people go out of their way to talk about her? Her offense lay in being too pretty to allow other women to forgive her her talents. In the light of Spencer Mapes’ surface glassiness, I saw that the truth was that Eva needed a protection which so far life had not granted her. Children and animals saw this. Although she was only intermittently fond of children, and then almost theoretically, they invariably assumed towards her the indulgent fondness of very old and wise persons; they might have been watching through the play hour that this innocent should not harm herself. Her Negro maid hovered over her, quite simply assuming, so far as she could, the part of mother. I scowled at Spencer Mapes. “Why don’t you keep away from her? She’s incapable of seeing through you.” He was light in his reply. “And what do you see--you with your singleness of purpose?”