“Mercy!  It’s the boy’s birthday—­I was to take him to his grandmother’s.  She was to have a cake for him and Ralph was to come up town.  I knew there was something I’d forgotten!”

XV

In the Dagonet drawing-room the lamps had long been lit, and Mrs. Fairford, after a last impatient turn, had put aside the curtains of worn damask to strain her eyes into the darkening square.  She came back to the hearth, where Charles Bowen stood leaning between the prim caryatides of the white marble chimney-piece.

“No sign of her.  She’s simply forgotten.”

Bowen looked at his watch, and turned to compare it with the high-waisted Empire clock.

“Six o’clock.  Why not telephone again?  There must be some mistake.  Perhaps she knew Ralph would be late.”

Laura laughed.  “I haven’t noticed that she follows Ralph’s movements so closely.  When I telephoned just now the servant said she’d been out since two.  The nurse waited till half-past four, not liking to come without orders; and now it’s too late for Paul to come.”

She wandered away toward the farther end of the room, where, through half-open doors, a shining surface of mahogany reflected a flower-wreathed cake in which two candles dwindled.

“Put them out, please,” she said to some one in the background; then she shut the doors and turned back to Bowen.

“It’s all so unlucky—­my grandfather giving up his drive, and mother backing out of her hospital meeting, and having all the committee down on her.  And Henley:  I’d even coaxed Henley away from his bridge!  He escaped again just before you came.  Undine promised she’d have the boy here at four.  It’s not as if it had never happened before.  She’s always breaking her engagements.”

“She has so many that it’s inevitable some should get broken.”

“All if she’d only choose!  Now that Ralph has had into business, and is kept in his office so late, it’s cruel of her to drag him out every night.  He told us the other day they hadn’t dined at home for a month.  Undine doesn’t seem to notice how hard he works.”

Bowen gazed meditatively at the crumbling fire.  “No—­why should she?”

“Why should she?  Really, Charles—!”

“Why should she, when she knows nothing about it?”

“She may know nothing about his business; but she must know it’s her extravagance that’s forced him into it.”  Mrs. Fairford looked at Bowen reproachfully.  “You talk as if you were on her side!”

“Are there sides already?  If so, I want to look down on them impartially from the heights of pure speculation.  I want to get a general view of the whole problem of American marriages.”

Mrs. Fairford dropped into her arm-chair with a sigh.  “If that’s what you want you must make haste!  Most of them don’t last long enough to be classified.”

“I grant you it takes an active mind.  But the weak point is so frequently the same that after a time one knows where to look for it.”