In the past month, she had been required to go to so many séances (some of which I knew to be imaginary, to be, actually, the Countess’ Saturday. For some reason, probably a clever one, she had never told Nathan that she had been “taken up” by Boston.) and had broken so many appointments with him that he had become hollow-eyed with anxiety, unstrung with the suspicion that she had another lover. It was this, combined with their very evident enjoyment of one another, that made me think Kakosan and Morgan had at least entered upon the preliminaries of a love affair.

2

I had no more than let myself in at Hopestill’s unlocked door than I was confronted with the proof of my suspicion, and it resulted from an incident which, by one of those almost supernatural timings of chance, occurred within the same hour that Nathan, two miles away and across the river in Cambridge, made the same discovery, his evidence being but slightly different from mine. The hall, through the carelessness of a servant, was not lighted yet, although it was quite dark, so that I could not distinguish the two people standing at one side of the door, possibly in an embrace, possibly helping one another with their wraps, but I heard Kakosan’s high-pitched voice, suffused with childish laughter, cry, “Gacho, don’t!”, the name by which, it will be remembered, she called Nathan. And Harry Morgan said, “Okay, baby, but wait till I get you home.” I was shocked, not only by the frank implications of these elided remarks, and the foretokening in them of Nathan’s heartbreak, but also by the boldness of this love-play, a dozen feet from the drawing-room door. I concluded that they had already been to the party and had been relaxed by the cocktails. This, at any rate, was an advantage, for I should not now be obliged to talk with either of them. It would have been too much, I felt, if I had had to be omniscient witness to the antics of these two as well as of the McAllisters’. I hurried past them and as I went up the stairs, caught Kakosan’s terrified murmur, “That was Sonie Marburg!”

Hopestill’s drawing-room was so spacious that despite her many guests, it did not seem crowded. As Miss Pride said of the room, “It’s not the temperature but the color that makes one think of an ice-chest. The fire in that pallid hearth gives no more warmth than the ones in the theater made with flashlights and red tissue paper.” It was called the “blue room” in contradistinction to an even chillier chamber, “the white parlor.” The floor was carpeted in silvery blue; the graceful chairs and sofas were upholstered in gray satin and heavy blue curtains hid the violet panes in the bay-window at the far end of the room. Bare of pictures (“I can’t afford originals and one doesn’t have prints,” she had said), the white walls were striated with gray shadows, for the room was dimly lit by a single bulb under the blue-green shade of a Chinese lamp. There was, as the Countess complained, nothing to look at in the room, for Hopestill detested bric-a-brac, having had her fill of it in her life at her aunt’s and, influenced perhaps by her prejudice against the maidenhair ferns and Aunt Alice’s Birthday Trifle, did not even put flowers on the tables.