And she replied, “Why, be that same inscrutable Euphrysone we know so well. You cannot fool me! You have known all along! I love you! Give Hope a kiss for me!” And she deposited a kiss on either cheek, one for myself and one for Hopestill which I did not propose to deliver.

The Countess’ house, like her person, was overheated and over-fragrant, and it was a relief to be on the street. I idled, taking the longest way to Hopestill’s house, and finding an organ-grinder on Marlborough Street, I stopped to watch his monkey. I did not really attend the sad little dressed-up animal, but I put penny after penny into his leather hand and dreamily looked at him and at his soiled old master who could easily have been his father. The trees had been out for some time and although now, in the twilight, it was cold, there was a quality of spring in the air. I wished that I were in the country or that, at least, I might stay out of doors until it was quite dark, doing no more perhaps than paying the monkey for the windy tunes.

I moved on. Undoubtedly the Countess was right. Philip’s disappointment had made him hate Hopestill. And his hatred, coupled with his atavistic, vindictive morality, prompted him to torture her, to batten himself upon the love of the two sated and now unwilling people. But simultaneously, as he caused them to remain at their revolting banquet, though they were gorged, caused them, like Paolo and Francesca, to embrace forever and be embraced by hell, he, as overseer must also be in hell, must see to it that they rendered him the true accounts, and did not embezzle from eternity one instant of relief.

Only for Harry Morgan did I have no pity at all. The Countess, while she had deplored him, had seemed to accord him a measure of sympathy as the victim of Philip’s persecution, although she could not deny my charge that he was in no way bound to accept invitations to Hopestill’s house. There was one reason and I suspected two why he continued to come. The first was simply that he was a snob and had no intention of cutting himself off from the one house where he was welcome; he was a climber and would have given a good deal to be “in” as he was in other parts of the country. A fortune, he had discovered, was not the open sesame in Boston that it was elsewhere and he had once observed to me with a sort of bitter wonder that he could count on the fingers of one hand the débuts he had been invited to in this “city of the dead, this town where human life is at a premium.” But there was, I thought, another reason why he did not refuse to come to the McAllisters’ dinner parties and that was the new addition to Hopestill’s gatherings (and the Countess’, too, for that matter), that is, Kakosan Yoshida. Whether they saw one another anywhere save on Commonwealth Avenue, I could not tell, nor did I know if their friendship had progressed beyond the raillery they engaged in over cocktails, but I had perceived that they nearly always separated themselves from the rest of us before dinner and, by the time the highballs were served, had drifted to the sofa at the end of the drawing-room farthest from the fire-place. What they talked of, I could not dream, for I was sure that Kakosan had not told her new friend that she was acquainted with his tutor. Certainly, I had not told Nathan of any of this. He would have been maddened with jealousy if he had known that they were ever in the same room.