I ran up the stairs and locked the door to my bedroom. Standing in the pitch darkness, I imagined what I would see when I snapped on the light. For this was one of the moments, most delicious because they came so seldom, that I realized I was in Boston. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and I could see across Louisburg Square to Mount Vernon Street where a house was lighted up for guests who came and went with singsong greetings and farewells. Amongst them, perhaps, were the Countess von Happel, the girl named Lou, Philip McAllister. Immediately above a chimney there shone a star so large that I thought at first it was a light. Automatically, I said, “Star light, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight; wish I may, wish I might have the wish I wish tonight. I wish that:” But I had got my wish and could find no other. The room was here and my signature was on it: my own pajamas and dark blue wrapper would be lying on the turned-down bed.

I groped for the switch. The instantaneous flood of light broke my tension. But the order of things, deranged by two chance encounters, first with Mrs. Prather and then with Herr Speyer, and by Miss Pride’s admonitions, was set right again. The mechanism would not be so tight for the repair, would henceforth be more liable to collapse, but for all practical purposes, it would serve. I was engulfed by a wave of love for Miss Pride, and gone with the dissatisfaction I had felt earlier was the spontaneous and perverse desire to marry that had not occurred to me until she had implored me not to.

Again, I so strongly disbelieved that she would grow old I wished to run downstairs to assure her. How could she? She who, the day before, had walked to Pinckney Street from Harvard Square and showing less fatigue than I who had strolled slowly home from Dartmouth Street, a tenth the distance, had taken me to King’s Chapel where for an hour we had admired the shabby gravestones in the burying ground, smirched with the droppings of impartial pigeons. She had looked at her man’s pocket-watch which she carried in her handbag and said, “Oh, we have half an hour before tea. I suggest we take a walk to Trinity and back.” I had lagged behind sometimes, but she pressed on, her ruthless pace diminishing at no time, not even at street crossings. As she often said, she had been a pedestrian long before automobiles had been thought of, and she was not one to give them the right of way. The light on Arlington Street had just turned red and cars were commencing to move along against us, but Miss Pride did not stop. A truck-driver, halted by her formidable approach, leaned from the cab of his monstrous machine and said, with certain awe, “Look at that damned old bird.” The old bird gave vent to one of her rare laughs and said to me, “He’s only envious. The great thing has lost the use of his legs from running that juggernaut. Come along, we must work up an appetite for tea, you know.”