“I use the word in its European sense, darling, as you perfectly well know.” She crossed the room to the bell-pull, and stood poised a moment, the light from the window enlivening her fair hair with brilliant undulations, her nose aloft. There was something at once so childish and so wise about her pose as well as about what she had just been saying that I smiled. She caught my smile, returned it, and said, “Don’t try to pretend any longer that you’re not a spy. You were spying on me just then. We will have some more coffee and something very special, a beautiful brandy.”

Bit by bit, in the course of the afternoon, my hostess’ conjectures came out. Some she revised, others she left intact; I proffered nothing new, but I was forced, by the sheer weight of her intuition which had synthesized random elements into a composition as clear as a case history written in a book, to agree with her. I did not, however, know any ease even with the assistance of the crystal-clear brandy, for I felt somehow that simply by listening I was letting Hopestill’s cat out of the bag.

Berthe von Happel, through the same sort of almost physical insight that Mamselle Thérèse had employed, had known from the beginning why Hopestill had suddenly decided to marry Philip. In another sort of society, her guess would probably have immediately occurred to anyone who did not believe that the girl was in love. But it would never have crossed the mind of, for example, Amy Brooks. Hopestill might be disliked, might be criticized for her inability to get on with her relatives-in-law, for her sharp and often cruel treatment of servants, for her bland disregard of charitable works, but no one would have dreamed of accusing her of so great a crime as the one she actually had committed and the one the Countess took matter-of-factly. For whatever else she was, Hopestill was a member of a society which did not countenance illegitimate children, which, in a sense, did not believe in them, just as the prim Victorian who is told for the first time of sodomy says with a firm scoff, “I never heard of it before. I don’t believe it. It’s merely a bit of obscene nonsense.” To be sure, shop-girls and servants frequently ruined their lives through such misdemeanors, but the people one lunched with and invited to dinner chose other means: dipsomania or betting on the horses. Bastardry was not acknowledged as a possible function of the upper classes. (I recalled, in a momentary flare of anger, how the first time I had met Philip McAllister, he had accused me of coming to him for an abortion.) But there had been a time, the Countess declared, when New England had not been so naïve, when sin was looked for in every stratum and duly punished.