But the proximity of this man, to whom having tea with Miss Pride was probably the most ordinary occurrence, brought back the objects of our common knowledge: the portrait, the chess table, the silver platter for the calling cards. And with the objects came my hostess’s warm, albeit noncommittal, compliments. On an impulse, I said, “Perhaps you could tell me why she invited me to come to tea?”

“Miss Pride is a very generous woman,” he said with the simplicity but lack of conviction with which, in speaking of the people we do not like, we acknowledge their virtues that are good in themselves but can serve no purpose to us. “She is known, I believe,” he continued, “as one of the most generous women in Boston. Last year, for example, she gave five thousand dollars to the Community Chest.”

“I have admired her ever since I can remember,” I told him.

“Really? Well, then, perhaps that’s one of the reasons she was, as you say, so ‘kind’ to you. I have never had the honor to be at tea with her alone . . . and never in the library.”

I could not grasp his irony. Did he mean that I had been singularly honored? Or had she, by shutting me up in the library, merely been taking precautions against my being seen by a chance visitor? I rose to go, dissatisfied with what the doctor had said and liking him a little less for not praising Miss Pride with the passion that I had believed must reside in the breast of anyone who knew her. He came around the desk and I observed that when he walked, his body did not bend in the slightest; his back was as straight, as inflexible as Ivan’s had been a few hours after his death.

“You can count on me. But the next time you want to crash a gate, make sure you have the right password. You wouldn’t have got in today if I hadn’t had an inkling that your ‘message’ was nothing but a leg-pull.”

•

I knew, by the pink eastern sky showing through the leafy chestnut trees, that it was time for me to be at the Brunsons’. Since my mother had been ill, I had been allowed to come an hour later but had made up for the lost time by working all day on Sunday. Mrs. Brunson was displeased with me, for I had been distracted and had done my work carelessly. Still, she had made a tentative promise to promote me to Maudie’s place in the fall. Maudie had by now completely lost control of her appetite for whiskey and twice had watered Dr. Brunson’s Vat 69 to his humiliation, on the second occasion, before a guest who, sipping a cocktail made from the expurgated bottle, remarked, “They certainly don’t put any teeth in their whiskey any more, do they?”