Lovecraft arrived in New York no later than April 24. Sonia writes in her memoir: ‘Late that spring (1928) I invited Howard to come on a visit once more. He gladly accepted but as a visit, only. To me, even that crumb of his nearness was better than nothing.’ How ‘gladly’ Lovecraft accepted this invitation we have already seen in the letter to Zealia Bishop. To his old friend Morton he is a little more expansive: ‘The wife had to camp out here for quite a spell on account of business, and thought it only fair that I drop around for a while. Not having any snappy comeback, and wishing to avoid any domestick civil war, I played the pacifist … and here I am.’

The ‘business’ referred to is Sonia's attempt to set up a hat shop in Brooklyn—368 East 17th Street, in the very next block from where she was living. Sonia had invested $1000 of her own money to set up the shop, which formally opened on Saturday the 28th. Lovecraft helped Sonia on ‘sundry errands’ on several occasions, including one stint of addressing envelopes from 11.30 p.m. to 3.30 a.m. one night.

But let us not be deceived; Lovecraft was by no means resuming his marriage any more than was necessary. Sonia writes with considerable tartness: ‘But while visiting me, all I saw of Howard was during the few early morning hours when he would return from his jaunts with either Morton, Loveman, Long, Kleiner, or with some or all of them. This lasted through the summer.’ Indeed it did; and his gallivanting began almost as soon as he came to town. And yet, although he did do some exploring of the region with friends—a drive along the Hudson River with Long; a visit to James F. Morton's museum in Paterson; a trip to Talman's home in Spring Valley, in Rockland County just above the New Jersey border—Lovecraft and Sonia did manage to go on 13 May to Bryn Mawr Park, the area in Yonkers where they had purchased property in 1924.