I said that this could only be pleasant news, since according to her account, recently given me, he had disliked me intensely. He had said to her that I had the remains of the great predatory nose of the Middle Ages; it was small but beaked, short and yet gave the impression of being too long. Eva reported that for once he had been clever in the way he put it: he had said that I was too small for my nose and my nose was too small for its type. “He really was delicious!” she had exulted. “Of course you don’t care what he says about you; and it is so seldom that I get the chance to quote him to any effect. I mean, he’s a man of few words. Sure you don’t feel badly over it?” I reassured her, and heard the rest of it. He had said that all things about me were just off something: my eyes were just off hazel and my hair was just off red; and that to wear my hair in a long and heavy bang was just off the right style for me, being at times too young for me and at times too old for me. “And, Dinah--” had then said Eva on her own account--“and this is my reason for telling you at all, darling--he said that all of this would be, merely, amusing, if your fingernails weren’t so often broken by the keys of your typewriter. I’ve implored you to give more time to beauty shops!” lamented Eva, sincerely grieved. I asked lazily: “At what part of the evening did he change his mind, Eva? Because I remember that on the way to one or the other of the orgies I overheard him say to you that my head was too big.” I remembered, too, that Eva had flown to my defence with “She isn’t conceited.” “I meant her skull,” he had said; and had had the grace to flush when he saw that I had caught him out. “It was a joke,” he had said lamely. Eva’s voice came over the telephone, clear and sweet and excited in retrospect. “Don’t you remember--” We went into every incident of New Year’s Eve during which our moods had varied with the tricky weather. The snow that with a gentle but deadly persistence swirled against my windows served to detach my attention from the mechanical carrier of Eva’s voice: we might have been once more in the taxi--Eva and Nicholas and I--on our way uptown to the afternoon party which opened the prolonged festivities of the day. The park was white and phantasmal, the trees weighted with ice, immovable, no longer part of New York; it was silent. But from the sidewalk there rang out on the frosty air the cries of children who snowballed each other. The taxi went muffled in a world of little treble voices; and through the early winter dusk the street lamps now pricked the way.