“And that reminds me that Philip McAllister called this afternoon and said that his grandmother would like to have you and Hopestill come to tea tomorrow. He’ll drive you up. If you have time, do take a stroll through Sleepy Hollow. But don’t put it off until after tea. Laura McAllister is such a chatterbox you won’t get away before dinnertime.” (Later that evening, she said, “When I spoke of Mrs. McAllister I didn’t mean anything unfriendly by calling her a chatterbox. She’s a charming woman, and it would displease me to hear that you had repeated what I said.” With an antediluvian notion that marriages could still be made by families rather than by individuals, she was anxious to stay on the right side of Philip’s grandmother.)

The account of her day amongst the graves alleviated only the suffering she had inflicted by humiliating me in the presence of a servant, but the other suffering that came from the fear that this was to be only the first of such occasions lingered as a dull but obtrusive ache. And because it was a symptom common to many diseases, there was no way immediately to identify it. It was inchoate fear, the first sign of all those irascible emotions that include hatred, contempt, despair, and so on. And after dinner, as we sat for an hour, according to our custom in the upstairs sitting-room and twice Miss Pride corrected my pronunciation of a word in the article I was reading to her from Harper’s Magazine, the pain became acute for a moment and when it had gone I felt the vague nausea that accompanies shock.

We did not have our coffee until I had finished reading, at eighty-thirty. It came up then on the dumb-waiter and Miss Pride established herself behind The Boston Evening Transcript while I filled the cups and brought a bottle of Benedictine from a closet in the “office.” My mistress was proud of saying that she took no medicines but “vinous and spiritous liquors” which she called “the medicaments of Nature,” and while she drank very little at a time, she had a glass of something at regular intervals throughout the day: at eleven in the mornings of week-days, she had a glass of port, but on Sundays, after her chess game, she had dry sherry. Before luncheon and dinner, she had two glasses of sherry and in the evening with her coffee a liqueur or a measure of rum which she took neat. The best of her liquor was kept in the den just off the upstairs sitting-room, and this was reserved for her own use. Less excellent whiskeys, brandies, liqueurs, and wines were kept in the library and given to guests when she entertained formally. The pantry and the cellar were stocked for the rank and file with domestic dry wines, low-priced Bourbon, and gallon jars of gin. I was not invited to pour myself a glass of Benedictine, but invariably she said, as she folded the newspaper but continued to read it and as I handed her the tiny green bowl on a thin gold stem, “Perhaps you’d like a glass of sherry. I won’t offer you any of this, for I’m sure you wouldn’t care for it, and it’s so dear I can’t allow it to be wasted.”