“Rather stand?...”  Moffatt himself dropped back into his seat and took the pose of easy narrative.  “Well, it was this way.  Undine Spragg and I were made one at Opake, Nebraska, just nine years ago last month.  My!  She was a beauty then.  Nothing much had happened to her before but being engaged for a year or two to a soft called Millard Binch; the same she passed on to Indiana Rolliver; and—­well, I guess she liked the change.  We didn’t have what you’d called a society wedding:  no best man or bridesmaids or Voice that Breathed o’er Eden.  Fact is, Pa and Ma didn’t know about it till it was over.  But it was a marriage fast enough, as they found out when they tried to undo it.  Trouble was, they caught on too soon; we only had a fortnight.  Then they hauled Undine back to Apex, and—­well, I hadn’t the cash or the pull to fight ’em.  Uncle Abner was a pretty big man out there then; and he had James J. Rolliver behind him.  I always know when I’m licked; and I was licked that time.  So we unlooped the loop, and they fixed it up for me to make a trip to Alaska.  Let me see—­that was the year before they moved over to New York.  Next time I saw Undine I sat alongside of her at the theatre the day your engagement was announced.”

He still kept to his half-humorous minor key, as though he were in the first stages of an after-dinner speech; but as he went on his bodily presence, which hitherto had seemed to Ralph the mere average garment of vulgarity, began to loom, huge and portentous as some monster released from a magician’s bottle.  His redness, his glossiness, his baldness, and the carefully brushed ring of hair encircling it; the square line of his shoulders, the too careful fit of his clothes, the prominent lustre of his scarf-pin, the growth of short black hair on his manicured hands, even the tiny cracks and crows’-feet beginning to show in the hard close surface of his complexion:  all these solid witnesses to his reality and his proximity pressed on Ralph with the mounting pang of physical nausea.

“This man...This man...” he couldn’t get beyond the thought:  whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the perspective...Ralph’s eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside Moffatt’s hand.  Faugh!  That such a hand should have touched it!

Suddenly he heard himself speaking.  “Before my marriage—­did you know they hadn’t told me?”

“Why, I understood as much...”

Ralph pushed on:  “You knew it the day I met you in Mr. Spragg’s office?”

Moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him.  “Did we meet there?” He seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment.  But Ralph had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that Moffatt had dined one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at the same table, their wife between them...  He was seized with another dumb gust of fury; but it died