“You have unquestionably married an unusual man,” Musgrave said.  “I—­by Jove, you know, I fancy my wife finds him almost as attractive as you do.”

“Ah, Rudolph, I can’t fancy anyone whom—­whom you loved caring for anyone else.  Don’t I remember, sir, how irresistible you can be when you choose?”

Anne laughed, and raised plump hands to heaven.

“Really, though, women pursue him to a perfectly indecent extent.  I have to watch over him carefully; not that I distrust him, of course, for—­dear Jack!—­he is so devoted to me, and cares so little for other women, that Joseph would seem in comparison only a depraved roue.  But the women—­why, Rudolph, there was an Italian countess at Rome—­the impudent minx!—­who actually made me believe—­However, Jack explained all that, after I had made both a spectacle and a nuisance of myself, and he had behaved so nobly in the entire affair that for days afterwards I was positively limp with repentance.  Then in Paris that flighty Mrs. Hardress—­but he explained that, too.  Some women are shameless, Rudolph,” Mrs. Charteris concluded, and sighed her pity for them.

“Utterly so,” Musgrave assented, gravely.

He was feeling a thought uncomfortable.  To him the place had grown portentous.  The sun was low, and the long shadows of the trees were black on the dim lawn.  People were assembling for supper, and passing to and fro under low-hanging branches; and the gaily-colored gowns of the women glimmered through a faint blue haze like that with which Boucher and Watteau and Fragonard loved to veil, and thereby to make wistful, somehow, the antics of those fine parroquet-like manikins who figure in their fetes galantes.

Inside the house, someone was playing an unpleasant sort of air on the piano—­an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and insistent.  It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play.  The tenderness and pride that shone in Anne’s eyes as she boasted of her happiness troubled Rudolph Musgrave.  He had a perfectly unreasonable desire to carry her away, by force, if necessary, and to protect her from clever people, and to buy things for her.

“So, I am an old, old married woman now, and—­and I think in some ways I suit Jack better than a more brilliant person might.  I am glad your wife has taken a fancy to him.  And I want you to profit by her example.  Jack says she is one of the most attractive women he ever met.  He asked me to-day why I didn’t do my hair like hers.  She must make you very happy, Rudolph?”

“My wife,” Colonel Musgrave said, “is in my partial opinion, a very clever and very beautiful woman.”

“Yes; cleverness and beauty are sufficient to make any man happy, I suppose,” Anne hazarded.  “Jack says, though—­Are cleverness and beauty the main things in life, Rudolph?”

“Undoubtedly,” he protested.

“Now, that,” she said, judicially, “shows the difference in men.  Jack says a man loves a woman, not for her beauty or any other quality she possesses, but just because she is the woman he loves and can’t help loving.”