“For that sort of thing, yes. So I’ve gone out a lot in New York, met many people; thought a little....” She twisted the leaf that she still held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf’s faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress and more on a tree’s branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air. “And here you are, at Clarissa’s.” “What an extraordinary woman she is!” The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth. “She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don’t know, that is.” “I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her.” “There is no way of telling.” “Anyway, I’m pleased she asked me here.” We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable _idée fixe_, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case ... but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans. “I’m going back to California.” “Tired of New York?” “No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again.” Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. “It’s rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He’s a kind of preacher.” “That doesn’t sound promising.” A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond’s surface. “But he isn’t the usual sort of thing at all. He’s completely different but I’m not sure just how.” “An evangelist?” In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb. “No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he’s American, and young.”