first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we
blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin,
could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled
by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet
English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations.
So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of
118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from
there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss
Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married
sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike
of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual
way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came
about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a
purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own
Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the
land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with
horticultural details.

It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky
or Mrs. Carville _per se_, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the
painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its novelty
and irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as
this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial
plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I
contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat.
It is our custom to have music after dinner.

Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent
to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties
of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such
problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend
opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at
this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that
prodigious composition, the Overture to _Tannhaeuser_, I gave myself up
to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity
of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I
reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass
and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine
careless raptures. We make and