“Been out to-day?”

“No, Max, I been sick as a dog, I tell you.”

“No wonder you’re sick, cooped up in this flat with nobody but a servant-girl for company.  Gad! ain’t you ashamed to get so low that your own servant-girl is your running-mate?  Ain’t you?”

“Max, she—­”

“I know.  I know.”

“I been so blue, Max.  Loo can tell you how I been waiting and wondering.  I—­Lord, I been so blue, Max.  She’s good to me, Max, and—­and I been so blue.”

“Never knew one of you wimmin that wasn’t that way half her time.  You’re a gang of sob sisters, every one of you—­whining like you got your foot caught in a machine and can’t get it out.”

“How you mean, Max?”

“Aw, you’re all either in the blues or nagging.  Why ain’t you sports enough to take the slice of life you get handed you?  None of you ain’t healthy enough, anyways, I tell you, indoors, eating and sleeping and mewling over poodle-dogs all the time.  I’m damn sick of it all.  Damn sick, if you want to know it.”

“But, Max, what’s put this new stuff into your head all of a sudden?  You never used to care if—­”

“And you got to quit writing me them long-winded letters, Mae, about what’s come over me.  Sometimes a fellow just comes to his senses, that’s all.”

“Max!”

“And you got to quit butting in my business hours on the telephone.  I don’t want to get ugly, but you got to cut it out.  Cut it out, Mae, is what I said!”

He quaffed his wine.

“Max dear, if you’ll only tell me what’s hurting you I’ll find a way to make good.  I—­I can learn lawn-tennis, if that’s what you want.  I can take off ten pounds in—­”

“Aw, I don’t want nothing.  Nothing, I tell you!”

“If I only knew, Max, what’s itching you.  This way there’s days when I just feel like I can’t go on living if you don’t tell me what’s got you.  I just feel like I can’t go on living this way, Max.”

Tears hot and ever ready flowed over her words and she fumbled for her handkerchief, sobs rumbling up through her.

“I just can’t, I—­I just can’t!”

He pushed back from his half-completed meal, rising, but stooping to rap his fist sharply against the table.

“Now, lemme tell you this much right now, Mae, either you got to cut this sob stuff and get down to brass tacks and tell me what you want, or, by gad!  I’ll get out of here so quick it’ll make your head swim.  I ain’t going to be let in for no tragedy-queen stuff, and the sooner you know it the better.  Business!  I’m a business man.”

She swallowed her tears, even smiling, and with her hand pat against her bosom as if to suppress its heaving.

“I’m all right now, Max.  I’m so full up with worry it—­it just slipped out.  I’m all right now, Max.  Sit down.  Sit down and finish, dearie.”

But he fell to pacing the red carpet in angry staccato strides.  His napkin dropped from his waistcoat to the floor and he kicked it out of his path.