Well, then, my own way—­it was “given me,” as Lorraine says—­was, taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming, at the supreme hour, to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly, with us:  my own way, I say, was to go, the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza’s whereabouts.  “She’ll either be with her friends the Chataways, in East Seventy-third Street—­she’s always swaggering about the Chataways, who by her account are tremendous ‘smarts,’ as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her; or else they’ll know where she is.  That’s at least what I hope!” said my wife with infinite feminine subtlety.  The Chataways as a subject of swagger presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly; I may be mistaken about New York “values,” but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very East Side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence closed to any mere indigenous appeal.  I was to learn later in the day that she’s a Macedonian Christian whom the Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service; a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.

The powder on the massive lady’s face indeed transcended, I rather thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream) reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made.  She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert—­mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she herself was “just being manicured in the parlor”; but was evidently surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question—­it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light, struggling there like a sunrise over snow—­of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine.  But mine of course carried the day, for mine showed it could wait, while hers couldn’t; the final superiority of women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more patiently curious.

“Why, is she in the city?”

“If she isn’t, dear madam,” I replied, “she ought to be.  She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown, and should have got here by midnight.”  Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could!  And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed.