Repeatedly she warned herself that Dwight, for all his Paris past and his present friendliness, was very fast becoming a New Yorker like the rest: making his way and climbing his climb, and wanting no climbers who had to be carried.

"Ethel Lanier, the first thing you know you'll be dropped like a hot potato," she thought.

"There's nothing unselfish about this man.

Don't make him feel he has you on his hands." And she would grow studiously abstract and detached in her talk about the town.

But it kept cropping up in spite of her, this warm eagerness to "really live." "It's funny," she said to Dwight one day.