Today, seeing my first drawing-room, I was deeply shocked, for in that brief glimpse, I was able to take in everything. It was no larger than the library and because it was well-lighted and the other had been dark, seemed even a little smaller. It was dominated by three large rival “units”: a bay window equipped with a long seat and a great many pots of foliage, a grand piano draped with a Spanish shawl, and a fire-place. Amongst, between, around those three behemoths, crouched chairs, to each of which had been assigned a companion, if not a table, at least a footstool or a standing lamp. The impression I got from the threshold was that if one wanted to reach the bay window, for example, he would have to “thread” his way through the furniture as in a crowded restaurant where the only vacant table is at the farthest end from the door.

As for a moment I stood where she had left me, I tried, quite frankly, to hear what was being said beyond the double doors. I caught only one sentence, spoken by the girl: “No, Aunt Lucy, it isn’t that you depress me, it’s the house. Otherwise, I would have dinner in tonight.”

I tiptoed across the hall. I did not know what to do. My jacket and tam were nowhere to be seen, and for a terrible moment I thought Miss Pride had forgotten to tell Mac to drive me home and that I should either be obliged to wait until she came out of the drawing-room, displeased to find me still here after she had told me good-by, or that I would have to find my way back to Chichester on foot, through the evil purlieus of the city. Near-by me, I saw a table on which lay a silver plate containing calling cards. The magic names sprang forth from their immaculate plaques in the dim light of the hall: Cabot, Frothingham, Coolidge, Hunnewell, Adams, Heminway. I could feel the very breath of her eminent callers who dropped, as though it were nothing, their venerable surnames in her vestibule.

A door behind me opened and, startled, I wheeled about, still holding a card that bore the name Apthorp. I thrilled to the recollection of having seen the name in The Education of Henry Adams which I had read by mistake for Civics class instead of The Americanization of Edward Bok. To be caught thus snooping in the calling cards gave me the same feeling of terror that I had felt in grammar school when I was apprehended in the act of passing or receiving a note, and for a second, being unable to make out who was in the hall with me (for I was so confused that I saw a white apron without realizing it), I was sure that I would be turned out of the house in disgrace. But it was only the servant girl with my things to inform me that Mac was waiting.