"What?"

"Oh dear," she said with a playful and humble moan, "looking at me-plain old me!-when there is such a specimen of beauty next to you." She made a gesture at Hattie.

Of course, I hadn't been looking at the pink-faced woman, or not intentionally. I realized I had fallen into one of my staring fits again. "I am surrounded by pure beauty, aren't I?"

Hattie did not blush. I liked that she did not blush at compliments. She whispered to me with a confidential air, "You are fixated on the clock, and have overlooked our most fascinating guest, the duck braised with wild celery, Quentin. Will not that demon Mr. Stuart allow you one evening free without work?"

I smiled. "It is not Peter's fault this time," I said. "I'm just picking, I suppose. I have little appetite these days."

"You can speak to me, Quentin," Hattie said, and seemed at that moment of a gentler cut than any woman I had ever met. "What do you think about now with such trouble on your face?"

"I am thinking, dear Miss Hattie…" I hesitated, then said, "Of some lines of poetry." Which was true, for I had just reread them that morning.

"Recite them, won't you, Quentin?"

In my excessive distraction I had taken two glasses of wine without eating properly to balance the effects of the spirits. So with a little persuasion, I found myself agreeing to recite. My voice hardly sounded familiar to me; it was round and bold and even resonant. To convey the style of presentation, the reader should stand wherever he happens to find himself and venture to pronounce in solemn and moody tones some of the following. The reader must also imagine meanwhile a cheery table exhibiting that species of abrupt, grating silences that accompany imposed interruptions.

When a period was put to this poem, I felt triumphant. There reached my ears thinly scattered applause, drowned out by a few coughs. Peter frowned at me, and simultaneously threw a pitying glance at Hattie. Only a few guests who had not been listening, but were pleased for any distraction, seemed appreciative. Hattie still applauded after all the others had stopped.

"It is the finest recitation ever spoken on a girl's birthday," she said.

Soon, one of Hattie's sisters agreed to sing a song at the piano. Meanwhile, I'd taken more wine. Peter's frown, which had quivered into place during the recitation of the poem, remained fixed when, after the ladies excused themselves to another room and the men began smoking, he brought me to a private corner where the massive hearth sequestered us.

"Do you know, Quentin, that Hattie came quite close to not wanting to celebrate her birthday tonight, and relented at the last moment upon my insistence on a supper?"

"Not because of me, Peter?"

"How could someone who thinks so much of the world depends on him not see what does depend on him? You did not even remember it was her birthday. It is time to stop, Quentin. Remember the words of Solomon: ‘By slothfulness the building decayeth, by idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.'"

"I don't know what you're driving at," I said irritably.

He looked straight at me. "You know well enough! This queer behavior. First, your strange preoccupation with a stranger's funeral. And riding the omnibuses back and forth without destination like a gadabout-"

"But who told you that, Peter?"

And there was more, he said. I had been seen running through the streets a week earlier, my dress out at the elbows, chasing someone like I was a police officer making an arrest. I had continued to spend inordinate amounts of time in the athenaeum.

"Then there is the idea of imagining strangers are threatening you on the streets for the poems you read. Do you think your reading is so important that people would harm you for it? And you wandering around the old Presbyterian burial ground like a pretty resurrection man looking for bodies to steal, or like a man who walks under a spell!"

"Hold on," I said, regaining my composure. "How do you know that, Peter? That I was at that old burial ground the other day? I am certain I hadn't mentioned it." I thought of the carriage hurrying away from the burial yard. "Why, Peter! Was it you? You followed me!"

He nodded and then shrugged. "Yes, I followed you. And found you at that cemetery. I confess openly I have been most anxious. I wanted to be certain you were not involved in some trouble or that you hadn't joined some cracked Millerites, waiting in white robes somewhere for the Savior to descend from heaven two Tuesdays from now! Your father's money will not last forever. To be rich and useless is to be poor. If you are occupied in strange habits, I fear you will find ways to squander it-or that some woman, some lesser member of the kinder sex than Miss Blum, by the bye, finding you in such a lonely state, will squander it for you-even a man with the strength of Ulysses must fasten himself to his mast when facing the artful woman!"

"Why would you leave that flower at his grave?" I demanded. "To mock me?"

"Flower? What do you mean? By the time I found where you had gone, you were kneeling on the grave, as though praying before some idol. That's all I saw, and it was enough. Flower-do you think I have time for such things!"

On this point, I could not help but believe him, as he truly sounded as though he had never heard the word "flower" before or beheld one. "And did you send that man to me? That warning not to meddle. To try to dissuade me from my interests outside the office? Tell me at once!"

"Absurd! Quentin, listen to your own flat nonsense before they send for a straitjacket! Everyone understood you needed time after what happened. Your depression of spirits was…" He looked away from me for a moment. "But it has been six months." Actually, it had been five months and one week since my parents had been laid to rest. "You must think of all this, beginning now, or…" He never finished this statement, only nodded with decision to impress the point. "It's that other world you're fighting against."

"The ‘other world,' Peter?"

"You think me at odds with you. But I tried to gain greater sympathy with you, Quentin. I sought out a book of tales by that Poe. I read half of one tale-but I could go no further. It seemed…" Here he lowered to a confessional whisper. "It seemed as I read that God was dead to me, Quentin. Yes, it's that other world that I worry about for you-that world of books and bookmen who invade the minds that read them. That imaginary world. No, this is where you belong. These are your class, serious and sober people. Your society. Your father said that the idler and the melancholy man shall ever wander together in a moral desert."