Throwing loose change on the counter, we rushed to the sidewalk. The trodden snow splashed our ankles as we jumped up and down and added our noise to the screams of every whistle in the harbour. We forgot our driver who still conversed in the Coffee Pot: he seemed, all at once, to be a sort of Father Time who came on the stage to cut off the head of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight. We commandeered a cruising taxi whose driver left his hand on the throttle of what the poet said thankfully was the most raucous horn in the world. “Never take your hand off that horn?” he implored the driver. “It enables you to stand out from the mob. You want to stand out from the mob, don’t you? Of course you do. It’s the ambition of every intelligent being.” “Aw!” said the thug-like driver. “Can’t a feller enjoy hisself when he gets the chanst?” The poet cast a benign smile on all in the taxi. “All human beings together, on this glorious occasion!” Eva held tightly to her husband’s arm as the crowd of us, refreshed by the combined effects of the coffee and the long drive uptown to Sutton Place, crossed the sidewalk in front of Florence’s house. “I know I’ll have pneumonia,” she predicted. “But maybe not; we have the health of whales.” He wondered, Nicholas said, if we did truly have the health of whales, which were warm-blooded animals in the wrong element. There was question of how to get into the living-room where, presumably, Florence Quincy stood to receive her guests. The man who had arranged to interview Eva, Henry Pepperel, wedged between two stout females and endeavouring to salvage what was left of his superior poise, called out to Nicholas: “You’re an observer, too, aren’t you? Do you fancy Miss Quincy is leaving me here, impaled, you might say, because I once interviewed her?” Eva no longer leaned on her husband’s arm. She stood alone and sufficient unto herself. She said: “Watch me break through!” Henry Pepperel crooned: “Oh, but you, Miss Litchfield--you can accomplish the impossible, naturally. You are one for whom crowds make way.” One of the stout females advised her not to believe him. “He’s always kind until he starts writing his interview.” We stood in the hall whence a stair with a delicate iron rail spiralled to the drawing-room floor. Behind us, amusingly, a fountain leaped from the wall and fell tinklingly into a shallow basin; and young Guy played with the startled goldfish and for the first time seemed at home. Nicholas still had Pepperel to contend with; into his unwilling ear the great interviewer dished up what he had found out from many years of the game. “Isn’t it imbecilic,” he confided, “that they don’t want to be interviewed unless it’s a grossly flattering spiel you turn out? And yet, they die like flies if you don’t beg them for interviews.”