Nathan was torn between the desire to keep the brushes and the desire to wound Kakosan by returning them. I persuaded him to keep them since they would be a souvenir of that aspect of her he had loved. It was some time before he ever used them, but when he did, practicing the few brush strokes he had learned from her, there came to the good side of his face a look of tenderness and longing, not for the person he no longer loved nor could love, but for the girl he had known in the beginning, had pursued like a bloodhound down the streets of Boston, hiding behind the subway kiosks as she, this still unknown beauty, stopped to buy fresh posies for her hair. Finally, after months of this delightful chase, he had accosted her at a street corner as they waited for the traffic to pass and had asked her if she knew of anyone who could give him lessons in Japanese. He would put down the brushes, pass his fingers over his marked cheek, and then would pour each of us a teacup of his violent sherry and tell me, for the thousandth time, that he would never love anyone but an Oriental woman again with the same kind of wonder that he had loved Yoshidasan in the first of those days.

I looked at my watch: at this very moment, Nathan’s train for New York was leaving from the South Station. At midnight tomorrow, he would sail for France. I felt no particular sense of loss. This morning when I had told him good-by in his basement room, stripped of his personal gear, his books and trash and the photographs of Dostoievsky and Heine which had hung over his desk, I had, on an impulse, taken between my hands his mutilated face and kissed him on the lips, and my kiss was not only a farewell to him but a resolute farewell to the temptations he had put in my path which had attempted to make my staid feet nomadic.

I flung my cigarette into the slimy pond and got up. If there were time, before we went back to Boston, I would take Kurt for a run through the woods behind Hopestill’s house. I hoped that I would be offered one of the rum cocktails which had been invented by Harry Morgan, the household’s former arbiter bibendi. Miss Pride had been making a tour of the Concord gardens in the company of several people whom she did not like, including the Mesdames McAllister, and I was confident that she would find herself in need of a restorative and would suggest to her niece that she “concoct a little something for us.”