“My eye!” said Eva, to settle that. “He, as an architect, is jealous of me as a novelist.” She said that Glidden had started it by his effort to boost Eva with her mother-in-law. His dictum had swept the rooms, so that in the end they had thronged around Eva with this new conception of her in their eyes. Except Mrs. Van Suydam: she held tightly to her own notions. The old lace at her throat and wrists was no more redolent of a cedar closet than her notions. “You know how, at a thing that has taken you aback, the muscles of your face slip, you think, for the rest of your life? Hers had slipped, at the shock of finding that there are those who consider me greater than the Van Suydams, into the inflexible front that she meant from then on to show. She, simply, won’t acknowledge it.” In fairness to the absent Nicholas, I suggested that possibly he had had no pang of jealousy. She gave me a long look. “I saw his face. He said to me--laughing it off: ‘A prophet in his own country, eh? A man’s reputation never exists in his family.’ The cronies were coming up to say goodnight; and they said ‘Nick, we never before realized what a famous woman you had married. You certainly did look high!’ Of course, the next morning I tried to smooth it over.” I almost moaned: “Oh, Eva! Eva!” She looked surprised. “Why not? Don’t you think it was the kind thing to do?” I started to say “Kind?” But she was so kindly sure that she had been considerate! She went on: “Nick is simple, sometimes. He began on a certain shame that he had got up over it; and naturally I realized how painful it would be if he acknowledged all of it--I had an idea that he’d brood over it--so I brought the talk to an end. He gave every evidence, besides, of getting hateful about it; for he said something about it not being so bad with my work. ‘With your flow of words--your beloved words--what’s to prevent your turning them loose on your book--finishing your book?’ He said that when a man wanted to build the greatest building of a great city, and the thing escaped, the fantastic idea was always beyond him because at the front of the poor man’s head was trouble and on the vision of the poor man’s strained imagination were the knocks of fortune: what was a man to do, in such case? The Devil, he reminded me, had helped the architect who designed the Cologne Cathedral; but the devils who were poking their fingers in this pie were not helpful visitants. He overlooked, you see, the self-evident fact that his mother’s friends are the bad visitants.” I fear that I showed my astonishment. “He was appealing to you for sympathy. You wanted his understanding of the problems--the agonies--of your work, and he asked you to consider his problem. Don’t you feel this?”