I had no sooner spoken than I realized, with a sudden access of horror what I had done.  In guessing I had sinned, but in guessing wrong I had ruined myself.  All this came to me instantly and positively, as by a psychic message of unparalleled definiteness from the dead ancestors whose portraits hung upon the paneling.  It was as though they had joined in a great ghostly shout of execration, which was the more awful because it was a silent shout that jarred upon the senses rather than the ear drums.  Then, before the lady replied, while the sound of my own voice saying “B-o-w-f-e-e” seemed to reverberate through the apartment, I suddenly comprehended the spirit of Charleston:  understood that, compared with Charleston, Boston is as a rough mining camp, while New York hardly exists at all, being a mere miasma of vulgarity.

There was a long silence, in which the lady to whom I had spoken gazed from the window at the rainy twilight.  Her silence, I am persuaded, was not intended to rebuke me; she was not desirous of crushing me; she was merely stunned.  Indeed, when at last she spoke, there was in her tone something of gentleness.

“The name,” she said, “is Beaufoy—­B-e-a-u-f-o-y.  It is of Huguenot origin.”

Passionately I wished for an earthquake—­one that might cause the floor to open beneath me, or the roof to fall through and blot me from her sight.  How to get away?—­that was my one thought.  To cover my embarrassment, I tried to make small-talk about a medallion of an Emperor of France, which hung upon the paneling.  The lady said it had been given to an ancestor of the Beaufoys by the Emperor himself.  That, for some reason, seemed to make things rather worse.  I wished I had not dragged the Emperor into the conversation.

“It is getting dark,” I said.  “It is time we were going.”

This the lady did not dispute.

Of our actual farewells and exit from that house, I remember not a detail, save that, as we departed, I knew that we should never see this lady again; that for her I no longer existed, and that in my downfall I had dragged my companion with me.  The next thing I definitely recollect is walking swiftly up Meeting Street beside him, in the rain and darkness of late afternoon.  All the way back to the hotel we strode side by side in pregnant silence; neither did we speak as we ascended to our rooms.

Some time later, while I was dressing for dinner, he entered my bedchamber.  At the moment, as it happened, I was putting cuff-links into a dress shirt.  With this task I busied myself, dreading to look up.  In the meantime I felt his eyes fixed upon me.  When the links were in, I delayed meeting his gaze by buttoning the little button in one sleeve-vent, above the cuff.

“Do you mean to say you button those idiotic little buttons?” he demanded.  “I didn’t know that anybody ever did that!”

“I don’t always,” I answered apologetically.