In the hallway that Sunday afternoon, an Irish maid was taking up peanut shells with a carpet sweeper, lost balloons were bunched on the ceiling above her white head, and Mr. Bruce met a dwarf, dressed as a clown, who had entertained at parties in his own childhood. The old man had not changed his stock of tricks or his patter, and he was proud that he was able to remember the names and faces of most of the generations of children he had entertained. He held Mr. Bruce in the hall until, after several wrong guesses, he came up with his name. In the living room a dozen friends and relatives were drinking cocktails. Now and then, a weary child, holding a candy basket or a balloon, would wander through the crowd of grown people. At the end of the living room, a couple who worked a marionette show were dismantling their stage. The woman’s hair was dyed, and she smiled and gesticulated broadly while she worked, like a circus performer, though no one was watching her.
While Mr. Bruce was waiting for Katherine to put her coat on, Mrs. Sheridan came in from the foyer. They shook hands. “Can I take you home?” he asked.
She said, “Yes, yes,” and went in search of her older daughter.
Katherine went up to her hostess and dropped a curtsy. “It was nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Howells,” she said, without mumbling. “And thank you very much.”
“She’s such a dear. It’s such a joy to have her!” Mrs. Howells said to Mr. Bruce, and laid a hand absent-mindedly on Katherine’s head.
Mrs. Sheridan reappeared with her daughter. Louise Sheridan curtsied and recited her thanks, but Mrs. Howells was thinking about something else and did not hear. The little girl repeated her thanks, in a louder voice.
“Why, thank you for coming!” Mrs. Howells exclaimed abruptly.
Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan and the two children went down in the elevator. It was still light when they came out of the building onto Fifth Avenue.
“Let’s walk,” Mrs. Sheridan said. “It’s only a few blocks.”
The children went on ahead. They were in the lower Eighties and their view was broad; it took in the avenue, the Museum, and the Park. As they walked, the double track of lights along the avenue went on with a faint click. There was a haze in the air that made the lamps give off a yellow light, and the colonnades of the Museum, the mansard roof of the Plaza above the trees, and the multitude of yellow lights reminded Stephen Bruce of many pictures of Paris and London (“Winter Afternoon”) that had been painted at the turn of the century. This deceptive resemblance pleased him, and his pleasure in what he could see was heightened by the woman he was with. He felt that she saw it all very clearly. They walked along without speaking most of the way. A block or two from the building where she lived, she took her arm out of his.
“I’d like to talk with you someday about St. James’s School,” Mr. Bruce said. “Won’t you have lunch with me? Could you have lunch with me on Tuesday?”
“I’d love to have lunch with you,” Mrs. Sheridan said.
THE RESTAURANT WHERE Mrs. Sheridan and Mr. Bruce met for lunch on Tuesday was the kind of place where they were not likely to see anyone they knew. The menu was soiled, and so was the waiter’s tuxedo. There are a thousand places like it in the city. When they greeted one another, they could have passed for a couple that had been married fifteen years. She was carrying bundles and an umbrella. She might have come in from the suburbs to get some clothes for the children. She said she had been shopping, she had taken a taxi, she had been rushed, she was hungry. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around. He had a whiskey and she asked for a glass of sherry.
“I want to know what you really think about St. James’s School,” he said, and she began, animatedly, to talk.
They had moved a year earlier from New York to Long Island, she said, because she wanted to send her children to a country school. She had been to country schools herself. The Long Island school had been unsatisfactory, and they had moved back to New York in September. Her husband had gone to St. James’s, and that had determined their choice. She spoke excitedly, as Mr. Bruce had known she would, about the education of her daughters, and he guessed that this was something she couldn’t discuss with the same satisfaction with her husband. She was excited at finding someone who seemed interested in her opinions, and she put herself at a disadvantage, as he intended she should, by talking too much. The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter, and they both looked wonderful. He got her a taxi at the corner. They said goodbye.
“You’ll have lunch with me again?”
“Of course,” she said, “of course.”
She met him for lunch again. Then she met him for dinner?her husband was away. He kissed her in the taxi, and they said good night in front of her apartment house. When he called her a few days later, a nurse or a maid answered the telephone and said that Mrs. Sheridan was ill and could not be disturbed. He was frantic. He called several times during the afternoon, and finally Mrs. Sheridan answered. Her illness was not serious, she said. She would be up in a day or two and she would call him when she was well. She called him early the next week, and they met for lunch at a restaurant in an uptown apartment house. She had been shopping. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around another failing restaurant, poorly lighted and with only a few customers. One of her daughters had a mild case of measles, she said, and Mr. Bruce was interested in the
