Long before this, Hopestill had damaged herself, though not irremediably, by her connections with “the Bohemians.” She had occasionally brought young men, who let their beards grow and who dressed most unusually, to the houses of her friends and her aunt’s friends, exhibiting them like trained poodles. Unconventional and explosive, they alarmed the hostesses whose disapproval could not find its exact target and fired nervously upon all sides. The poverty of these barbarians was thought to be an intentional and Communistic affront; they were believed to be practitioners of free love, companionate marriage, and atheism; their painting or their writing was eyed with distrust as revolutionary or satirical. The Boston hostess, finding herself at the mercy of a novelist (she had not heard of him and therefore could not tell if he was a satirist or not) guarded her words against the escape of a stupid or a typical remark, yet most typically, most stupidly, said, “I hope you won’t put me in one of your novels.”

It would have been tolerable, everyone thought (according to the Countess, my faithful informant), if Hope had been content merely to bring her friends to parties for, despite their appearance, they behaved usually quite well. It was that Hope had given herself such insufferable airs, sprinkling her talk with the cryptograms of literary critics, explaining, unbidden, the meanings of abstruse poems. She had painstakingly studied out an erudite essay on “psychical distance” the year before and for several months judged thereby every book, painting, play, or movie that came up. But as someone remarked—someone who probably had never heard of the esthetic principle she used so boldly—she shot only at sitting birds, and she was openly laughed at when she was heard to say to Amy Brooks, “The trouble with your Oyster House pastel is the figure in the fore-ground, which is under-distanced. He is simply too much the pitiable bum. He actually brings tears to one’s eyes, and that won’t do.”

To be sure, she was over her “intellectual” phase and no longer carried marinated herring to the obscure studios. But she had not become any more manageable. Exactly what she was doing in New York no one knew. Indeed, no one knew her address beyond the vague fact that it was “in the fifties.” When someone said to her, “I wish you’d look up my friend so and so. She has a charming place on the Park and I know you’d find her amusing,” Hope replied with a warm smile, “It’s terribly sweet of you. Of course one never does anything one wants in New York, but do give me her address anyhow.” Only once had anyone seen her and that only by chance. A Miss Bradley, an elderly spinster, idling away an hour between appointments in Central Park, had come on Hopestill staring raptly at the sea lions who were being fed. “Oh, aren’t they beautiful?” the girl had cried. “Oh, aren’t they wondrous! Oh, if only I had seen them when I was a child. You know, Miss Bradley, that Aunt Lucy never let me go to the zoo.” Miss Bradley, reporting this uninhibited speech to Amy Brooks, said, “I expected her to give me a lecture on child psychology, but she spared me and we had a very pleasant little chat.”