Occasionally Miss Pride’s lawyer, a Mr. Breckenridge, came to luncheon and I heard them talking of taxes and dividends. Once she said, “When you get back to town, I’d be obliged if you’d give Barton a ring and tell him I want to sell my Sears Roebuck. I’m going in for public utilities.” I was deeply impressed by her State Street argot, a few phrases of which I had heard Dr. Brunson use to his friends. But Dr. Brunson could never have said, with such casual yet unfeigned interest, “By the way, what did the pound do in the Bourse yesterday?”

Even more than by her familiarity with high finance, I was stirred by her intellectual life. For years without fail, she had set aside two hours of each day, from eleven until one, when she sat erectly in a corner of the lobby reading The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and the novels of Trollope, Henry James, Thackeray, and William Dean Howells. When I was enchanted by a book and did not put it down for several hours together or when, in the winter time at school, I found myself in arithmetic lesson dreaming of being free to read, I was ashamed of my intemperance, remembering Miss Pride. I wondered if she would not be flattered if I dropped an intelligent remark now and again which would reveal that I had read what she had. Consequently I borrowed The Awkward Age, by Henry James, from the public library. The title appealed to me for I had heard Mrs. Henderson say of her daughter, Sarah, that she was at “the awkward age.” After a tormenting evening of poring over the completely unintelligible sentences of the novel, I returned it early in the morning of the next day and I did not try again to read Miss Pride’s favorite authors, but contented myself with attracting her attention in more modest ways. I made her a pen-wiper out of the top of a black cotton stocking and delivered it with a bunch of black-eyed Susans. She thanked me graciously. “You are very thoughtful,” she said. “I will think of you every time I wipe my pen.” Emboldened, I invited her to come see my little brother of whose appearance I was very proud, but she declined. “Some other day, my dear,” she said. I never had the courage to ask her again, for I felt that she was not really interested in Ivan. I told her once that he had prickly heat. She shuddered, “Oh, mercy! How dreadful!” It had not seemed dreadful to me, but only uncomfortable for my little brother. Later on I realized that by “dreadful” she had meant “unattractive.”