On an impulse that I regretted and in which I heard myself speaking with Nathan’s irascible and naïve resentment of wealth, I told the doctor how Miss Pride had conveniently arrived in Chichester the day after Ivan was buried in the potter’s field, although I was certain she had got my letter sometime before. He answered with a laugh, “You don’t understand the first article in the philanthropist’s code which is that one never takes suggestions but always hunts on his own hook for the places where his money will do good. If it weren’t for that, I would have suggested myself that she send you to a business school. As it is, we must simply wait and see if it occurs to her. And if it doesn’t, that still won’t mean you can’t go to Boston. I’m a native of the place too and have ways of getting young ladies jobs. I might even hire you as my receptionist, though you wouldn’t like that.”

Our conversation took place on the last Sunday he drove me to Wolfburg. In the middle of the next week he was leaving Chichester for a vacation in Manchester where, as I knew, Hopestill Mather was spending the summer. Afterwards, he was going back to Boston to begin his practice in an office, outfitted by his doting mother with glass brick partitions, a costly imitation Kashmir, lucite magazine tables where would lie what she called “the leading periodicals” and the alumnus bulletins of Groton and Harvard. He had described the appointments of his office with what I felt was an unwarranted sarcasm and had told me that if I were ever ill, after I had come to Boston to live, I must allow him to examine me with his Shreve, Crump, and Low stethoscope kept in a Mark Cross case.