I had again lost sight of Nicholas. I reminded myself that there was nothing I could do about it. And he came back through the crowd on the stairs, Eva’s wrap over his arm. He pushed Spencer Mapes aside with his elbow and held the wrap for his wife. Winnie stopped dancing to ask if I were going with them. I said that I was not; I added, still more disagreeably, that if they were luckily let alone by all of us they might have a chance. “A chance at what?” asked Winnie skeptically. From the head of the stair-well, Spencer Mapes looked down on them as they departed. Leaning thus over the balustrade, he seemed to embody in his lean dark face, in his intent eyes, all mishaps of the year just dead, all mishaps to come in the year just born; he might have been juggling the two years, watching to see how he might toss and catch the balls. Thankful to be alone at last, I took a taxi and rolled swiftly down Park Avenue, encountering no traffic lights. New York was supine, played out by its merry-making. Dawn was in possession of the city. There is nothing so disheartening as dawn that is not rosy. From a position of relaxation in my splendid chair, I was by now droopingly over the arm. But through the telephone came, sprightly and interested, Eva’s dear little voice: “Now, darling, that you’ve seen Nick and me together, what do you think?” “I prefer not to say.” I was determined on this. “H-m!” came over the telephone. I knew that she had drawn her small mouth into a button-hole: she did this when resolved on something. “Well, anyway, Dinah, you must acknowledge that he’s a heavy load to carry on my shoulders when I am with my friends? You see that he’s impossible at a party.” [Illustration] II I cautioned myself: “My good woman, don’t be partisan. At every opportunity, you’ve stated that there are two sides to a question. Why not, with your always well explained inquisitiveness, look into Eva’s husband’s side?” He was not so reticent as I had anticipated. Or rather, I imagined the truth lay between his inherited reserve and the trick of ready confidences which to a certain extent he could not have avoided catching from his wife’s crowd as if it were the measles. He must have been bewildered. Nothing of his mother’s training could have prepared him for Eva. As we would say, I wanted his slant on Eva. If one waited long enough, Eva played into one’s hands. I demurred at one of her demands to see me at once; I must, I told her, see an editor who was more immediately important. She suggested that I meet her at her publisher’s where, if I insisted on putting business in her head, she remembered she should go. She again asseverated the urgency of seeing me without delay.