“Well, Sonie? Well, how would you like to get drunk? I very much regret that as I am currently in love with someone else, this is the only amusement I can offer you.”

It was the only amusement I was capable of enjoying. Even the prospect was sedative. As we went into the hall, Nathan said, “I assume that you won’t mind doing the boozing in my sort of saloon?” We met the soulless face of the butler who, opening the door for us, said to me, “Good evening, Miss Marburg. I hope you won’t find it too wet underfoot.”

“Want to come along?” said Nathan to him, but the man, ignoring him, said to me, “Of course you have a very short walk home.”

“She’s not going home, you buzzard,” said Nathan, looking closely into the snobbish face. “Slave!”

Both the man and I were too shocked to speak. The white door slowly closed and I was certain that I looked for the last time upon the Countess von Happel’s brass knocker.

FOUR

1

Now on the glossy Sunday after I had stayed until four o’clock in the morning with Nathan Kadish at a café in Scollay Square, I had as my traveling companions not only shame, jealousy, and despair, but in addition a headache that pounded and reverberated through each convolution of my brain and stretched to bursting each tunnel and cove of my skull, a tidal nausea, a chill as dry and plunging as a winter wind. Last night’s snow was deep and glazed, played on by bright sun, and the pavement over which we drove was like a polished blade casting upward shimmering filaments of frosty light. The spruce, hibernal landscape, simplified like a conventional design in which the vitality and the heterogeneous shades of autumn had been discarded for a white and mortal rigor, gave to the condition of my body and the state of my mind an incisive accent, and I could neither see nor imagine a source of warmth (chilliest of any detail in this fixed scene was the dun tendril of smoke ascending from a white chimney), nor could I be reminded by anything presented here of the good, the gratifying, the ennobling, or the pleasing elements of life. For I could observe only contrast, and in personifying nature as one will sometimes do in illness or in melancholy or conversely in well-being or in joy, I saw myself rebuked by the immaculate, inflexible earth for having been the night before exactly the opposite, just as I had been rebuked earlier this morning by Miss Pride whose wintry eyes in her bone-clean face had extinguished my heart’s heat so that I had stood like a stalagmite beside the chess-table receiving her terse lecture.