ar for us, truly, if, after all, they
were only in the manicure line. She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says,
my massive lady was, in the "parlor" where I don't suppose it's usually
done; and aren't there such places, precisely, AS Manicure Parlors,
where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope,
for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from
us! Otherwise, by all the gods, it's just a boarding-house: there was
exactly the smell in the hall, THE boarding-house smell, that pervaded
my old greasy haunt of the League days: that boiled atmosphere that
seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic "wash" and to
inferior food--as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the
saucepan and the latter in the tubs.

There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway's
queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza's nephew--the droll effect of
her making on her side a discovery about ME. Yes, she made it, and as
against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if
Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged
in New York about Eastridge. I didn't clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come
up to the brag--or perhaps rather didn't come down to it: since I
dare say the poor lady's consternation meant simply that my aunt has
confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at
the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not
as--well, as what I am. Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward
a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the
joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty
minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle
justified.

I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet
alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a
bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward! There
he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a
mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly
but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep--or even,
for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence
shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young
despair wishes to commune with immensity it can ONLY do so either in a
hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on
my prey