The view from Eaglewood was famous—yet visible, Héloïse Spear reflected, to none of those who habitually lived with it except herself. Her mother, she thought, had probably seen it for a while, years ago, in her first eager youth; then it had been lost in a mist of multiple preoccupations, literary, humanitarian, and domestic, from which it emerged only when visitors were led out on the verandah for the first time. "Ah, our view—yes," Mrs. Spear would then murmur, closing her handsome eyes as if to shut herself in with the unutterable, away from the importunities of spoken praise. And her guests would remain silent, too much impressed by her attitude to find the superlatives expected of them.

As for Mr. Spear, his daughter knew that he had simply never seen the view at all; his eyes had never been still long enough. But he had read of it in verse and prose; he talked of it with vivacity and emotion; he knew the attitude to strike, deprecating yet possessive, lighting a cigarette while the others gazed, and saying: "The poets have sung us, as you know. You remember Bryant's 'Eyrie'? Yes—that's the Eaglewood view. He used to stay here with my wife's great-grandfather. And Washington Irving, in his Sketch Book. And Whitman—it's generally supposed … " And at that point Mrs. Spear would open her eyes to interject: "Really? You didn't know that my husband knew Whitman? I always scold him for not having written down some of their wonderful talks together—"

"Ah, Whitman was a very old man when I knew him—immobilized at Camden. He never came here in my time. But from something he once said I gathered that Eaglewood undoubtedly … yes, I must really jot it all down one of these days… ."

Mr. Spear's past was full of the dateless blur of the remarkable things he had not jotted down. Slim, dark, well-preserved, with his wavy grayish hair and cleverly dyed moustache, he was the type of the busy dreamer who is forever glancing at his watch, calling impatiently for timetables and calendars (two articles never to be found in the Spear household), calculating and plotting out his engagements, doubting whether there will be time to squeeze in this or that, wondering if after all it will be possible to "make it," and then, at the end of each day, groaning as he lights his after-dinner cigar: "Devil take it, when I got up this morning I thought of a lot of rather important things I had to do—and like a fool I forgot to jot them down." It was not to be expected, Halo thought, that a man as busy as her father should ever have time to look at a sunset.