I had no intention of meeting her; but I went--possibly from a fear that otherwise I should miss the key note. I went from a magazine editor’s office--where there were gay curtains at outside windows and gayer flowers on the desk--to the inner cubicle of all publishers: the waiting-room nicely calculated to break the nerve of the most recalcitrant. I found Nicholas Van Suydam already in waiting on Eva. He was seated on a comfortable sofa, but he looked half his usual size; even his long legs were shorter. The atmosphere of the cubicle was heavy with the suspended breathing of those on the rack, and Nicholas glanced furtively at persons whom he did not recognize but whom he assumed to be authors in various stages of expectancy. A young fellow clutched to his breast a manuscript that could only be his first. A frowsy female, by the force of her determination, held down a reluctant secretary while she pointed out the best passages in her book which was still in the relatively happy state of not having been rejected. The bored head of a department shared a corner with a gentleman who preached on the excellencies of a work that so far was in his head and on charts which he spread over their united knees. A small though firm woman said: “I insist on speaking to the young man who changed my commas in my last book.” Over the partition separating the cubicle from the main office there came the high-pitched irritation of typewriters. The activity of book publishing leapt the partition, and fell upon the heads of those who wrote books and weakened their stamina by its superior organization. I said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to speak to me.” He said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to see me.” The fact that we had reached the point where in concert we laughed at his wife and my friend broke upon us at the same time, and we stopped laughing to curiously inspect each other. But I knew that he was going to tell me almost as much as she would have told. He remarked inadequately that we had been seeing each other at teas, and as I let this pass without comment he continued: “You look like a meditative kitten. Have you been saying to yourself that I am a lazy devil? But I’ve always found late afternoon in New York a maddening time of day. I want to hurry home, and call out through the darkening house ‘Where are you, Eva?’ And Eva goes to teas, at this eerie hour. If I don’t go with her, I am assailed by loneliness. Dark, in the street outside. You know how it looks, down there, very late in the afternoon; I called your attention to it, the last time you were down.”