"Soon I will turn in," I said.

He nodded.

"You understand," he said, "that she is what they call a genius."

"She?" I laughed.

"She, Mathilde." He looked up and held my eye again in that clear alarming way. "The one who made your hanging johnny hard."

I must never drink with him again, I thought. In the darkness I could hear the surf breaking on the American shore.

"A genius?"

"She paints only the light," he said fiercely. "There is nothing else for her." He held up the sheet of paper. It was a woman's face, but not Mathilde at all.

"This is all I can do," he said. "I have no ability no matter how I work."

I was, in spite of everything, impressed, not only with the portrait-a girl of twenty with a great deal of curling unkempt hair-but in the urgency and agony he brought to its execution. It was not art in the educated sense of the word, for it was really too disturbing-the whole, in its rush and incompleteness.

I thought, This represents the mother of his child. Her lip is swollen. She has been crying.

I understood that he was offering it to me, but as I reached to accept the gift, he snarled suddenly, showing the whole pink line of upper gum. His canines all exposed, he balled the portrait in his fist and threw it out into the night.

Later I heard him making an awful clatter in his cabin.

WHEN WE FINALLY crested the hill which had provided the last obstacle to my heart's desire, I understood, from the calm authority of the estate before me-its aesthetic balance, the good order of its fences, the clean white clusters of its barn and stables, its gardeners' cottages-and from the clearly expressed democratic idealism of the house, the nature of Miss Godefroy's inheritance.

My companion, until now rather sullen beneath his blanket, offered comment.

"My," said he. "You've fallen on your feet."

Thus as always-just as one's sympathies were most engaged by him.

It was now November in Connecticut, and the savage splendor of the autumn had burned away. The soft maples were bare. Only a few apple trees held out green. An overcast sky gave a lovely gray flatness to a pond.

Approaching along the smooth pink road that swept so sweetly through the sward, it seemed I had finally stumbled on what New York and Philadelphia had refused to show, that secret center of the new nation, that part that answered to its highest possibility. The Doric columns of the mansion seemed well earned for being so clearly thought, the statement of an aspiration, both noble and democratic. And I was not unamused, in the midst of this, to reflect that it had been a pretty ankle that had led me on, a generous bosom that brought me sweeping down this road, trotting toward the orchard, around the pond, to the long rolling sward across which a young woman ran and jumped, a fine athletic movement, as if it were not only the architecture but the body itself that spoke to the ancient Greek ideal. Her, in fact. Herself.

Old Farm, as it was modestly known, was such a delightful expression of America that I missed dear Blacqueville with whom I might have dissected and reassembled its significance and who, even when lighthearted, would have had a great deal more to offer than English sarcasm.

Of the fellow I was about to meet I knew only what Duponceau had told me. Mr. Philip Godefroy was of a southern family famously split among themselves on the subject of their own extraction, one party determined it was French, the opposition convinced they were Swedish Godfrids. Thus, they seemed to me pretty representative of all Americans, in that their connections with the past were of so little substance that they could be shaped and described almost any way they liked. Mrs. Godefroy I understood to be an Englishwoman, perhaps of noble family. Duponceau had not been sure, but was certain that neither husband nor wife-both being busily involved in perfecting and improving what they saw around them-attached the least importance to crests or escutcheons. They were both restlessly opposed to slavery and in favor of universal suffrage. Mr. Godefroy had attended Yale College and graduated a doctor, but had never practiced medicine having conceived a very definite theory about society and its relationship with nature, an idea made concrete by the porch, on which subject he would later occupy me in many hours of inquiry and conjecture. So although a porch might seem a small enough thing to you, in Godefroy's scheme it was at once a physical structure, a delineation of vast space and also a metaphor. The importance of the porch was such that not only the rich should have the luxury of enjoying nature but also the common man. In fact, he saw it as a kind of social engine, one which, when properly designed, would help a mechanic or farmer or laborer become more virtuous and educated.

It would be beneath a grander Grecian version of this humble appendage where I would meet my very erudite and handsome host, and also feel my cheeks warmed by the presence of she whom I affected to be unaware of.

She was taller than I had remembered, and although she had just returned from chasing with her dog and had a twig in her hair and a scratch on her cheek, she was far more pretty than I had dared remember.

Amelia-I do believe I never heard her Christian name mentioned by the Peeks-easily negotiated those social rapids created by Mr. Larrit's ambivalent position-neither upstairs nor downstairs and sarcastic in between. She had a boy carry his duffel and billeted him in one of the bedrooms on the second floor which, in the American fashion, were tucked in two low-ceilinged stories behind the soaring reception rooms that distinguished the face of the house.

I did not thank her. I did not say a word to her. Instead, I furiously interrogated her father about the uses of the lash in Wethersfield. The dog licked my hand. I did not feel him. It required all my host's grace and humor to rescue me from myself, placing me in the care of his elderly manservant who, so Mrs. Godefroy said fondly, laying her hand on the old man's shoulder, had begun heating water for my bath the moment he spied the dust of my coach "back at Taylor 's Flat."

He had not been the only one working so assiduously for my arrival, for when I reached the room I found not only the steaming bath but also, on my bedside table, a copy of Tartuffe. I thought, She loves me. I kissed the pillow like a fool, inhaled the familial, familiar dust and wax. She will be mine, you are too far away to stop me.

DEAR LITTLE MOTHER, I hope by now you have all my letters from Philadelphia, and my account of the history of the servant you engaged for me. On this matter, I have a great deal to say, but as the days go by I become less certain of what that is, and as we have arrived at Wethersfield, Connecticut, I am hoping to have a vacation from his company.

We are at the house of Mr. Philip Godefroy, a member of the Wethersfield Prison Board, which was the reason for my seeking him out, although this now seems to be the least of his accomplishments. He is the most naturally distinguished man I have met in America. He is well versed in all the political questions which interest his country and possesses the most precise understanding of the judiciary institutions of the United States.

I now spend all my time with him in conversations from which I have everything to gain. As soon as I am alone I write down what he has said. I have not yet met a single other person from whom I have drawn nearly so much. There are at his house three charming women, his wife and his daughters, Amelia and Catherine. Catherine is barely ten, but Amelia is closer to my own age and would give me terrible distractions if I had not, once and for all, made up my mind to have none. The two girls both have that white and rose complexion, occasionally to be found in Englishwomen but quite unknown in France. I have not yet seen in the United States such a velvet softness. It is impossible to describe. But why talk so long about her? Were I to continue you would think me in love, and the truth is I am not. In any case, I expect to be here another three or four days and by then I do not doubt she will have sung for me and, as on those other occasions, made my considerable willpower quite unnecessary.