We sat among the sweet carnations and daffodils and roses whose fragrance and chaste petals, some of them made even lovelier by the whorls of steam rising from our teacups, softened the edges of our predicament.

It was my mother who spoke first. “If it was summer, the ladies at the Hotel would get us a nice coffin and a pretty tombstone. Miss Pride would give us the money if it was only summer. Don’t you have anything left of the golden egg?”

The golden egg had been used up years ago, but my mother could never believe it and now and again she sought it in my father’s Bible, tearing the thin pages in her impatience.

I had thought of Miss Pride, but I had hoped my mother would not. The temptation to send her a letter had been strong until I remembered that often I had heard her talking to her friends of the impertinent requests she received through the mail. A young man who described himself as a “would-be writer,” after paying Miss Pride and her deceased father (neither of whom he had ever known) three pages of fulsome compliments, asked her to forward him a Remington typewriter at her earliest convenience. It was his specifying the make of the machine that most appalled her, and she had sent him a lead-pencil with the note, “I regret that I cannot supply you with a Remington typewriter and hope that you will instead accept, with my best wishes, this Ticonderoga lead-pencil.” But, on the other hand, I had heard that she had sent two deserving young men, of good but impoverished families, through Harvard. I thought of how, when I was a little girl, I used to dream of her coming to our house, wearing black silk gloves and carrying a funeral wreath for my dead parents. I said aloud, “I wonder if she would.”

Pretending that I was going for a walk, I went out of the house, but instead, crossed over to the shop. It was here before Ivan’s epilepsy that I had done all my reading and studying, for in the house I could never be free of interruptions. I had made my father’s work table into a desk, its principal feature being a German silver inkwell embossed with doves which I had found in one of the boxes. The room was dark from the fog and I lighted a candle by whose unsteady flame I composed my letter to Miss Pride. I stated my case formally, saluting her “Dear Madam” and offering her, in exchange for the fulfillment of my “novel request” my services in the humblest part of her establishment for the rest of my life. I asked her to telegraph her reply. But if she were disinclined to forward me the money, I begged her to forget my importunity and to regard me still as her “obedient servant, Sonia Marburg.”