“Good-by then,” and again Nancy thinks that things simply will not be dramatic no matter how hard she tries. She decides to take a small walk however--small because she simply must get to bed before Mrs. Winters comes back and starts talking at her improvingly. The walk seems to take her directly to the nearest Subway--and so to the Pennsylvania Station, where, after she has acquired a timetable of trains to Melgrove, she seems to be a good deal happier than she has been for some time. At least as she is going up the cake-colored stairs to the Arcade again she cannot help taking the last one with an irrepressible skip. XXXVII Oliver had quite a little time to think things over as the two-seater purred along smooth roads toward New York. The longer he thought them over, the less amiable some few of the things appeared. He formed and rejected a dozen more or less incredible hypotheses as to what possible connection there could be between Mrs. Severance and Sargent Piper--none of them seemed to fit entirely and yet there must be something perfectly simple, perfectly easy to explain--only what on earth could it be? He went looking through his mind for any scraps that might possibly piece together--of course he hadn't known Peter since College without finding out that in spite of their extreme politeness toward each other, Peter's mother and father really didn't get on. Club-stories came to him that he had tried to get away from--the kind of stories that were told about any prominent man, he supposed--a little leering paragraph in “Town Gossip”--a dozen words dropped with the easy assuredness of tone that meant the speakers were alluding to something that everyone knew by people who hadn't realized that he was Peter's friend. A caustically frank discussion of Mrs. Severance with Ted in one of Ted's bitter moods--a discussion that had given Oliver a bad half-hour later with Louise. But things like that didn't _happen_--people whose houses you stayed at--people your sister brought home over the week-end--the fathers of your own friends. And then Oliver winced as he remembered the afternoon when all the New Haven evening papers had screamed with headlines over the Witterly divorce suit--and Bob Witterly's leaving College because he couldn't stand it--that had been people you knew all right--and everyone had always had such a good time at the Witterlys' too. It was all perfectly incredible of course--but he would have to find Ted just as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to find him--and as the little reel of the speedometer began to hitch toward the left and into higher figures, Oliver felt very relieved indeed that he had the two-seater and that Mr. Piper wasn't coming into town till the 7.03.