She shook her head. “No. Isn’t it amazing? Why, it’s poetry, Dinah; and he’s just an ordinary sort of man!” He dreaded returning to the house, and every night put off until a later hour his dismal acceptance of its shadowy taunt. A man’s home--it was so dreadfully evident that Nicholas’ dominant instinct was that life must bring him a home--should be the expression of his hopes; but in this small house there was loneliness and a sense of frustration. It did not speak of the establishing of a family: there was no sound in the house. He had found himself listening to the Italian families as they straggled past on their way to bed; the lifted voices of the parents, wrangling with their children, began to be the deep voice of life. It brought what he supposed was a bewildered smile to his face, to realize that he wanted children. “Do you see how he got it into his head?” asked Eva of me. “It was being without me. Poor old Nick!” The second summer had not helped to clear things up. He had got into the way of going to his mother’s: Eva suspected her of staying in town so that she might give harbourage to her son. She had not said so; but she had the faculty of saying things by refraining from saying them. Eva told me: “I reminded him that in the big house in Washington Square there is no sound; and he came back at me with the statement that in every nook and cranny it conveys that it has always cherished the sounds of the private life of a family. She is still gospel to him. It appears that she walked around here with him one evening; and all those things for the solution of which he had delved through agony of spirit, all the things that--undoubtedly from his life with me--he had begun dimly to see, were contained in his mother’s simple denial of individual liberty. She said to him: ‘Leave it to God, my child. He is still able to manage these questions. He--and nature--always have.’” Eva was one of those women who, even through hard work, with loss of sleep, are themselves so shining that before the man’s jaded eyes, in a gloomy New York room, on a winter’s day, Aphrodite might have arisen from the foam all iridescent loveliness. She had a way of smiling wistfully. Whether outdoors the sun shone or not, she had the sun in her hair. I was impelled to ask: “Tell me this: is he still in love with you?” “Oh, my God!” said Eva. “It’s a funny thing, though,” she resumed, after a pause during which she smiled secretly. “He’s jealous of my fame.” Fame is a word that, self-applied, makes me wince. But she said it simply, surely, and un-self-consciously. “It started at a reception his mother gave for me when we were first married.” She looked at me curiously. “What is the matter, Dinah? It’s disconcerting, to have you burble with your amusement when I can’t see that this is so very amusing.”