The East 19th Street chapter was closed when Boyde went to Blackwell Island; another in the same street had begun: Mrs. Bernstein begged us to move with her: we owed her big arrears of rent; also, for some odd reason, she really liked us. In her odd way she even tried to mother me, as though her interest, somewhere perhaps her pity too, were touched. “You haf had drouble in England, I subbose?” she hinted sympathetically. She had read the newspapers carefully, and could not understand why I should be exiled in poverty in this way unless I had done something shady at home. It followed that I had been sent out to America for my country’s good. She shared, that is, the view most people took of my position in New York. Only three months had passed since we arrived, but it seemed years. I had never lived anywhere else. The sheltered English life, the Canadian adventures, above all the months upon our happy island, lay far away down the wrong end of a telescope, small, distant patches, brightly coloured, lit by a radiant sun, remote, incredible. It was not myself but another person I watched moving across these miniature maps of memory. Those happy days, states, places, those careless, sanguine moods, those former points of view so bright with hope, seemed gone for ever. I now lived in a world where I belonged. I should never climb out again. The intensity of emotion at the time is difficult to realize now, and quite impossible to recapture. I only know that my feelings burned like fire, all the fiercer, of course, for being inarticulate. The exaggeration was natural enough; everything was out of proportion in me: Boyde had destroyed my faith in people. I believed in no one. The doctor had said that to lose belief in others made life insupportable. I found that statement true. There was a deep bitterness in my heart that for a time was more than I could manage, and this distrust and bitterness led me into an act of cruelty that shames me to this day. Into the roar and thunder of that frenzied newspaper office stole a hesitating figure one afternoon, a shy youth with rosy cheeks and curly hair, dressed in shabby but well-cut clothes, and obviously an Englishman. He wore gloves and carried a “cane”; these marked him as a “Britisher” at once. He was asking for someone; fingers were pointed at me; he was faintly familiar; I had seen the face before--but where? He came over and introduced himself as Calder, son of a Midland coach-builder; we had met at some place or other--outside a studio door, I think--and he knew Kay. I forget what he was doing in New York---idling, I think, or travelling. He had outlived his cash, at any rate. He was in difficulties. I distrusted him instantly. He was, of course, another Boyde. I gave him the curtest possible greeting. He, in turn, found the greatest possible difficulty in telling me his story.