Mr. Perkins, lifting his bowler, faced her across the engine of Miss Pride’s car, his white teeth revealed in a smile that agreeably elevated his little mustache. “Good mahning, Susan! We’re having a little dinnah pahty for him next week. You’ve been told to come, haven’t you?”

“Indeed I have!”

They bowed and smiled again and as he replaced his hat, Mr. Perkins added jestingly, “I see you don’t go to church.”

The roar of traffic, commencing to move along again with the green light, drowned out her reply, but I had faith in her and knew she would not make a fool of herself with a serious counter. Probably at Billy Perkins’ farewell party, when his parents made their appearance during cocktails, after which they would leave the “youngsters” to themselves, the sally would be repeated, and Susan would say something like, “I really enjoy church, you know! But Sunday is such a lovely time to exercise my dog!” making her neglect of religion rather endearing as well as temporary for, her gentle, wistful tone implied, she was prepared for the inevitable and would graciously assume her duties towards God as soon as she had settled down either as a matron or as a spinster. And Mr. Perkins, into whose glass was being poured a second cocktail while the girl extended her fingers over her glass to show that she had had enough, would say that he absolutely agreed with her and that when he was her age he probably would not have gone to church either if it had not been compulsory. “Things were so line and rule,” he would say, making the staid girl’s heart flutter at this testimony of her generation’s liberty. “You wouldn’t have had a cocktail, for instance,” he would continue as she gazed proudly into her Martini in which the olive was still an inch from the surface of the liquid.

As one tenacious of sleep in the early morning, I hoarded the moments of the drive along the avenue against the time when we would turn off towards Boylston and then into the Fenway. For to me, as to those whom the Countess derided when she said, “Boston is a very small place,” the city ended precisely at Massachusetts Avenue, and all the rest of it, the cold, uncrowded medical college, the spacious Brookline parkways, the large houses of new materials and derivative architecture, the wide modern drives, did not belong to Boston with its narrow houses and painted doors, and I felt that the expatriates dwelling in Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park and Milton were but wealthier versions of the bourgeois Brunsons. I admired the horseback riders along the bridle paths which bordered Jamaica Pond and the ice-skaters, but did so only because I thought they merely used the resources of these fertile outskirts but returned, at the end of their diversion, to Pinckney or Marlborough or Beacon Street. I felt altogether differently towards such towns as Concord, Lexington, Bedford, Lincoln, and these, together with certain parts of Cambridge and what I called “Boston proper” constituted in my mind “greater Boston” whereas everything in between, even though nearer to the State House, was clearly excluded. I could not revise my map even when I learned that eminent families lived, and had for generations, on Blue Hill Avenue in Milton, in Needham, in Newton.