So that was the name of it: Pinckney Street. I repeated the words to myself and the house where she lived all winter now seemed less strange because it was not merely in Boston but was in a specific street with a specific number of houses. Henceforth my daydreams would not begin with the vague condition, “When I live in Boston with Miss Pride,” but with, “When I live on Pinckney Street.”

“Oh, but before we go,” she said, her foot on the running board, “I want you to take me to the shoemaker here. A Mr. Marburg.”

The car drove off and I sank into the chair at the writing desk, faint with a conflict. For the joy I felt in Miss Pride’s going to call on my father was scotched by my shame of our shabby shop, my father’s untidiness, and my mother’s loquacity. Nor did I know whether she was seeking him out as Mr. Brock did, because he was educated, or if she was going to him on business, to have him half-sole her Ground Grippers. If her intention were the latter, now, at this very moment, I must relinquish my ambition to be her young and well-beloved friend.

The letter to her niece was gone from the writing desk and in its place was one addressed to herself and postmarked London. I was less moved by the foreign stamp and the strange, thin paper of the envelope than I was by what next caught my eye: it was my own name, Marburg, written on a memorandum pad together with the legends: “Call Breckenridge at three” and “flue in the upstairs sitting-room.” That meant, then, that there was also a downstairs sitting-room so that the house was surely big enough to accommodate me as well as Hopestill Mather and Miss Pride. Perhaps even now she was saying to my father that although she realized he was a good man and well educated, she believed he owed it to me to give me a better home which she herself was willing to provide.