“All right,” I said. “I’ll try once more. It will be a little later next Sunday, I expect.” We shook hands and said good-by with an exaggerated warmth.

I walked quickly between the banks of snow which lighted the streets like moonlight. A few doors from Nathan’s building, I heard someone playing a recorder and I paused for a minute to listen. It was a tender, doleful tune like some Irish lamentation. The bold blood rushed to my face and fingertips. I passed on and peered into the uncurtained ground-floor rooms of students, for no other purpose than to see that they were all clean and comfortable, all unlike Nathan’s and unlike my red room.

The room had been a little random daydream which I could have again, or it was like a lengthened déjà vu, that evasive quasi-memory which is a sort of unlearned knowledge of the soul. I could, I knew, in time, name in its real place each object in the room, and I felt confident that even after my vivisection, the room would accomplish again its impeccable synthesis, a fused and incomprehensible entity. It was a sanctuary and its tenant was my spirit, changing my hot blood to cool ichor and my pain to ease. Under my own merciful auspices, I had made for myself a tamed-down sitting-room in a dead, a voiceless, city where no one could trespass, for I was the founder, the governor, the only citizen.

FIVE

1

The dressmaker who had been imported from New York to make Hopestill’s trousseau was known by her trade name, Mamselle Thérèse, which she herself always substituted for the nominative case of the first person singular pronoun, as though she were her own interpreter. “Mamselle Thérèse does not touch the potatoes,” she said on her first evening to Ethel who frankly tittered. She said to me, “Mamselle Thérèse goes to a night-club twice a week in New York,” by which I understood she wanted me to supply her with the Boston equivalent of this diversion, but I did not respond as she had hoped and thereafter she made no more such overtures but amused herself (and presumably me) in designing costumes which she said would “bring out” my personality. She spoke of Chanel, Lilly Daché, Mainbocher as if they were Brahms, Bach, Mozart, or Plato, Descartes, and Hegel. “Daché composed a superb number for an archduchess last month, a really revolutionary turban. People were simply swept off their feet.” Like the bald barber recommending a hair restorer, like the dentist whose teeth are false, Mamselle Thérèse dressed most frumpishly. She wore a strange assemblage of seedy garments, too large for her spare, nimble frame, out-of-date, soiled, frayed, reminding me of the hand-me-downs that two or three times a year the Brunsons’ Boston relatives sent them to be given to me. And it was not only that the little modiste had clothed herself out of a rag bag, but that she had very bad taste, burdening herself like a fancy-woman with gimcracks from the five and ten cent stores: wooden brooches in the unreasonable shape of a Scotty dog or of an ice-skate or of a Dutch shoe or of a football; enameled beetles or dragonflies or cobras made of tin, with blinding rhinestone eyes; earrings in the shape of oak-leaves or candlesticks; and with any costume, upon her right arm, she wore nine thin silver bracelets which she clanked interminably. Her shabbiness could not be explained by poverty, for she had a flourishing business, and the expensive dresses of her two assistants who had been lodged in a house on Joy Street, suggested that she could afford to be generous in their salaries. She was charging Miss Pride a shocking price for this assignment, as I knew from the estimate she had handed in on the day she arrived. She spoke quite openly of this as “a good thing.”