then?"

"Yes, please say her nephew from Eastridge--!"

"Oh, her nephew--!"

"Her nephew. She'll understand. I'll come back," I repeated. "But I've
got to find her!"

And, as in the fever of my need, I turned and sped away.

I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but
instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don't know why,
miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in
the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively
on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and
roaring, much noisier even than the Works at their noisiest, but with
its old rich thrill of the Art League days again in the air, was already
almost Paris for me--so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park,
where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next
thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it's the very antithesis
of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn't
have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it
was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains
of sense she would have put in an appearance at the Chataways' with the
lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early
stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as
their train, that of the "guilty couple," got in; no matter how late in
the evening. It was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had
got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New
York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she HAS, on all this ground
of those people, been piling it on! If Maria, who has so bowed her
head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it
to--well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for
Eliza, that I found myself, while I walked about, fairly entertaining
for my sister.

What were they, what ARE they, the Chataways, anyhow? I don't even yet
know, I confess; but now I don't want to--I don't care a hang, having
no further use for them whatever. But on one of the Park benches, in
the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for
we hadn't, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them:
Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that
she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that
brilliant woman HAD gone pretty f