It was towards the end of the summer that Dr. McAllister first asked me what I proposed to do after the Hotel had closed. I told him that Mrs. Brunson had invited me to be Maudie’s successor. (Maudie had gone to Idaho as soon as the Brunsons left for Provincetown. She went by bus, taking with her a quart bottle of whiskey and parting from me with a hearty handclasp and the exclamation, “Idaho, here I come! It’s round-up time for this here old bench.”) The doctor said, “Is that what you want to do?” As if I were speaking to him in his professional capacity and telling him the symptoms of a disease which I knew to be incurable, I told him that since I could remember my goal had been Boston, that the only career I had imagined for myself was serving Miss Pride as her housemaid or her laundress or her lady-in-waiting.

“I dare say that could be arranged,” he said. “She spoke to me the other day of getting a secretary and I’m under the impression that she had been thinking of you. She is very fond of you, you know.”

I was not so pleased as I felt I should have been. It was as if she had sent the doctor as her ambassador for some obscure purpose of which even he did not know. And I was invaded by the same doubt of her that I had felt when she brought the cyclamen after Ivan’s death and I had seen her in the winter sunlight for the briefest moment as an old, ugly woman inspired by a tenuous and urbane evil. But the doctor’s blue eyes, in which were registered many thoughts in no way connected with me, were so ingenuous that I was convinced he spoke the truth and that she was, indeed, fond of me.

“That was good of her,” I said. “But it doesn’t help me, because I have no qualifications to be her secretary.”

“But even that is of no importance. I’ve told you, I think, that she’s thought to be one of the most generous women in Boston and there is no reason why she shouldn’t send you to a business college.”