She stared, but then airily considered.  “Oh, well—­I guess she’s somewheres.”

“I guess she is!” I replied.

“She hasn’t got here yet—­she has so many friends in the city.  But she always wants us, and when she does come—!” With which my friend, now so far relieved and agreeably smiling, rubbed together conspicuously the pair of plump subjects of her “cure.”

“You feel then,” I inquired, “that she will come?”

“Oh, I guess she’ll be round this afternoon.  We wouldn’t forgive her—!”

“Ah, I’m afraid we must forgive her!” I was careful to declare.  “But I’ll come back on the chance.”

“Any message 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.