She felt his hand sliding down her arm as she released the coat to his too-eager fingers.  “Oh no, Mr. Flint!  Thank you, nothing.  It’s only a bit of rain on the surface.  I’m quite dry.”

“Quite dry!” He echoed her words with a guffaw.  “Well, then, we’ll have to moisten you up.  I always say everything’s a good excuse for a drink.  If you’re cold you take a drink to warm up; if you’re warm you take one to cool off.  You dry out on one, and you wet up on one.  I don’t know of any habit with so many good reasons back of it.  I’m dry, too....  We’ll have a Bronx!  That’s a nice, ladylike drink.”

Claire weighed her reply.  She did not want to strike the wrong note; she wanted to let him have a feeling that she was accepting everything in a normal, matter-of-fact way, as if she saw nothing extraordinary in the situation.

“You’re very kind, but really you know ... if I’m to get my dictation straight....”

“Well, perhaps there won’t be any dictation.  We’re not slaves, you and I. Maybe it will be much pleasanter to sit before the fire and listen to the storm.  What do you say to that?”

She turned from him deliberately, under the fiction of fluffing up her hair before a gilt mirror near the door.  She was thinking quickly and with a tremendous, if concealed, agitation.  “Why,” she laughed back, finally, “that would be pleasant.  But I came to take dictation, Mr. Flint.  And women ... women, you know, are so funny!  If they make up their minds to one thing, they can’t switch suddenly to another idea.”

He was paying no attention to her remark, a remark which she felt would have fallen flat in any event, since it was so palpably studied.

“The living-room is in there,” he said, pointing.  “Make yourself at home.”

She went in and sat before the fire.  Flint disappeared.  She tried hard to analyze the situation.  It was unthinkable that Mr. Flint had deliberately planned this piece of foolishness.  He must have had some idea of work when he had telephoned her; perhaps he still had.  It was his way of being facetious, she argued, this fine pretense that it was all to be a pleasant lark, or it may have been his idea of hospitality.  Of course he had been drinking, but she took comfort in the thought that there must be instinctive standards in a man like Flint that even whisky could not swamp.  At least he must respect his wife—­surely it was not possible for Flint, drunk or sober, to offer such an affront to her, however little he respected the women in his employ.  She dismissed Mrs. Richards’s exaggerated insinuations with their well-deserved contempt, but she could not thrust aside quite so readily the eye-lifting tone with which Stillman had met the announcement of Mrs. Flint’s absence from home.