Good night, John.”

After he had gone I stood at the window, pulling aside the blinds just enough to see that it had begun to snow. The two great cities, each with its own flavor, hold you like rival suitors, perversely when you are with the other; and that night, as I watched the pavement whitening, I thought of those other pavements that were called roadways, and the subways tubes, and the whole long list of equivalents Brad and I once compiled as we tramped across Hampstead Heath on a day when other things were in our minds.

* * * * *

I first met him at Professor Byfleet’s house in Chelsea, but I didn’t catch his name when we were introduced, or perhaps we weren’t—the English are apt to be slack about that sort of thing, they are civil but not solicitous to strangers, and when you visit one of their houses for the first time it’s hard not to feel you are among a family of initiates, or else a dues-paying but nonvoting member of a very closed-shop union.

This dinner at the Byfleets’ wasn’t anything important, at least by comparison with many we went to; Byfleet was an anthropologist who wanted my father to finance an expedition to New Guinea, so he doubtless thought he’d have us meet his friends. I suppose they’d all been told we were rich Americans, with the blow softened by adding that my mother was English. My father never did finance the expedition, anyhow.

As I said, I don’t remember actually meeting Brad, but when we got to the table I noticed him some way further down on the other side, next to my mother. Now and again I glanced at him, and with a rather odd feeling that I had seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t be sure; he was good-looking in a restrained way, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a long straight nose, and a chin that was firm without being aggressive. There was also a mood of gravity over him, tempered by a sort of intermittent nervousness as if he were waiting for a chance to say something, not because he wanted to, or had anything to say, but because he thought everyone must be wondering why up to halfway through dinner he hadn’t spoken a word. I hoped my mother would soon take pity on him, but his other partner moved first, and I could see that the more she tried to draw him out the more he drew himself in. She was one of those voluble unkempt Englishwomen who invade a conversation rather than take part in it, and have a conspiratorial smile for the maid or butler, just to show they’ve been to the house before.

I missed what was happening across the table for a while, for my own neighbor engaged me, a hearty professor of biology who mentioned, apropos of the veal cutlets, that man had only scratched the surface of his possible gastronomic repertoire, that practically the entire insect world was an untapped storehouse of taste novelties, that dried locusts made an excellent sandwich, that there were many edible caterpillars fancied by the Chinese, and that native tribes in the Andean foothills pick lice from each other’s heads and eat them with gusto. He seemed surprised when I wasn’t upset, and after I had accepted another cutlet he confessed that he often opened up like that to jeunes filles whom he found himself next to at dinners, because in the event that they were bores their distress at least made them momentarily entertaining; but he could see I was not a bore, so perhaps I would now talk about something serious. I said I could never talk seriously to any man with one of those bristly little toothbrush mustaches, and was it true that in certain crack regiments of the British Army men were compelled to have them? He answered, Good God, how should he know, better ask our host, who was a recognized authority on totem and taboo. After that we got along fairly well, and presently he paid me what many Englishmen think is the supreme compliment; he said he wouldn’t have guessed I was American.

Suddenly I was relieved to see that my mother, across the table, was talking to her nervous neighbor. I knew then that everything would be all right. She was adept at putting young men, indeed men of any age, at their ease; she didn’t mind if they talked politics or business or art or sport—even if they were intellectual she never tried to match them at it, and if they weren’t she would make them feel a freemasonry existing between her and them in a world, or at a table, of highbrows. Actually she was cleverer than she pretended—not that she was especially modest, but in her bones she felt that men do not like clever women, and what she felt in her bones counted more than anything she could think out with her intelligence. She had had an upper-crust education composed of governess, boarding school, then finishing school abroad, and probably she had forgotten 95 per cent of everything she had ever learned from textbooks; but she had done nothing but travel and meet some of the world’s most interesting people for almost twenty years, and the result was a quick-minded knowledgeableness unspoiled by knowledge. It made her understand politicians rather than politics and diplomats rather than diplomacy. She talked plenty of nonsense, and it was easy to trap her, though not always to prove that she was trapped; and she would go on discussing a book she said she had read but manifestly hadn’t, or she would break up a dull conversation with some fantastic irrelevance for which everyone was secretly grateful.

After dinner I wasn’t anywhere near the nervous man, but when the party broke up it appeared we were scheduled to drop him where he lived, which was in our direction, and because we were also taking two other guests on their way, he sat in front with Henry. We dropped these others first and then he moved inside, but there was hardly time for talk before he began urging us not to drive out of our way, his place was only a short walk from the main road, anywhere near there would do. But my father insisted: “No, no, we’ll take you right up to your door”; so Brad had to direct Henry through a succession of side streets, and eventually gave the stop signal in the middle of a long block of four-story houses with basements. He said good-night and thanked us, bumping his head against the top of the car as he got out.

“North Dakota,” my father said, as we drove away.

“Yes, he told me too,” said my mother. “I’d have known it was somewhere in the Middle West from his accent.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said, and mentioned the Englishman’s compliment to me.

My father smiled and seemed in an unusually good humor. He wasn’t always, after parties at other people’s houses. He said: “I find my own Kentucky drawl a great help with the English. It makes them think me tough and guileless, whereas in reality I’m neither.”

“And in reality you haven’t even got a Kentucky drawl,” said my mother.

“Haven’t I? How would you know?… Well, coming back to Dakota. I had some talk with him after the ladies left the table. Seems he’s a research lecturer at your college, Jane.”

“Then that’s where I must have seen him before. I had an idea I had.”

“A young man of promise, from all accounts,” my father went on. “Byfleet spoke highly of him.”

My mother commented: “If we’d had any sense we’d have dropped him at the corner as he asked us. He probably didn’t want us to know the sort of place he lives in.”

“Oh nonsense. A boy like that, making ends meet on a few fees and scholarships—nobody expects him to stay at the Ritz.