She rose and drew on her gloves as if the matter had been settled and her question had only been rhetorical. I stammered, “Oh, Miss Pride, you are very kind to me!”

She glanced at the floor where my rainbow funny papers lay and I was not sure that she would not retract her invitation. But she said, looking up at me again, “Not at all. Now Mac is right outside and I’m going to walk back to the Hotel so you can start out to see your mother.” She started to the door but turned. “My dear, you won’t bring your pictures to my house, will you?”

BOOK TWO

Pinckney Street

ONE

1

The back Bay Business College was a morose establishment in a once fine house on Dartmouth Street, now infested with tongue-tied girls who seemed always on the verge of tears under the persistent scoldings of the mistress, a vulpine woman in her forties who regarded herself as an educator. Had we been a little younger, I am sure Mrs. Hinkel would have rapped our bungling fingers with a ruler, for incompetence inspired in her the most ardent displeasure. At the very beginning, she had singled me out for especially lusty maledictions, insisting that I was wasting my money and her time, for I would never in a thousand years learn to operate a typewriter with any more skill than a dog. What aggrieved her the most in me was the “reach stroke” of my right fourth finger for which she held a marveling contempt: “Class, gather and observe! Observe the fantastic reach stroke Miss Marburg deludes herself into thinking is the proper reach stroke. Learn by this example if you ever hope to make an asterisk visible to the naked eye!” In other branches of my commercial education, I was somewhat abler, being at the top of the class in Business English (because I could immediately distinguish between the nominative and the subjective cases and because the subjunctive mood did not baffle me) and being known as a “good worker” in the shorthand class.