“Oh, it’s California, very likely,” Miss Pride was saying to a youngish woman I had met before. “Most of them settle in the west, you know.”

When Miss Pride spoke of “the west,” it was as if she said “somewhere.” It was not quite a void, but it was something stretching interminably behind one’s back. Yes, she replied to her friend, she had been “out” once, and had not the least desire to go again.

“I dare say their rugged life and bad climate make the people hardy. But I must confess I find the Rocky Mountains quite hideous, quite lacking in style. They’re too much of a good thing, so to speak. Even if the landscape didn’t offend me, though, I couldn’t endure the place more than ten days at a time. There is a crackly feel in western speech that sets my teeth on edge.”

Her friend had spent three months in Saint Louis and countered, “But you should go to the middle west if you want to hear really peculiar speech. Of course Saint Louis is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. I could not get the key to the city. Is it southern? Is it mid-western? Is it an imitation of a German industrial town? I don’t know. But I do know that their accent makes it almost impossible for an easterner to understand what they say. If someone told you, ‘I lived tin yars in Versales, Mazura,’ would you have the least idea that he meant, ‘I lived ten years in Versailles, Missouri’? By the way, isn’t Versailles an amusing name?” The woman, whose home was in New Canaan, pronounced “idea” with a clear final consonant.

I was curiously soothed by this colloquy which was the first thing that came to my ears, for Miss Pride, no matter what scandals and disasters were perpetrated under her very nose, would never change. I assumed that she and her companion had been wondering where Kakosan’s father lived. Miss Pride’s announcement, “Most of them settle in the west, you know,” made the Japanese immigrants as remote and unconnected with the world in which she lived as if they had never left their native shores, and Kakosan Yoshida herself went up in thin air. So long as Miss Pride was here, I thought, I could face anything. I was comforted to see that while she disdained the tray of canapés held before her by a maid, she exchanged her empty glass for a full one when the butler came round, so that I knew she would stay a little longer at least.

Feigning great interest in someone’s proposed walking tour through Brittany, and someone else’s plan to present Hopestill with a set of lawn bowls for her Concord house, and Edward Pingrey’s recent attack of bronchitis, I actually only heard Philip’s voice, superimposed upon all the others. He was not yet drunk, but he had reached a stage of animation which often just precedes almost hysterical excitement.