Mrs. Gatewood raised her pretty eyes in silence; Kerns returned her amused gaze rather blankly.

“Clubs!” sniffed Gatewood.  “What are clubs but pretexts for wasting time?  What mental, what spiritual stimulus can a man expect to find in a club?  Why, Kerns, when I look back a year and think what I was, and when I look at you and think what you still are—­”

“John,” said Mrs. Gatewood softly.

“Oh, he knows it!” insisted her husband, “don’t you, Tommy?  You know the sort of life you’re leading, don’t you?  You know what a miserable, aimless, selfish, unambitious, pitiable existence an unmarried man leads who lives at his club; don’t you?”

“Certainly,” said Kerns, blinking into the smiling gaze of Mrs. Gatewood.

“Then why don’t you marry?”

But Kerns had risen and was making his adieus with cheerful decision; and Mrs. Gatewood was laughing as she gave him her slender hand.

“Now I know a girl—­” began Gatewood; but his wife was still speaking to Kerns, so he circled around them, politely suppressing the excitement of a sudden idea struggling for utterance.

Mrs. Gatewood was saying:  “I do wish John would go to his clubs occasionally.  Because a man is married is no reason for his losing touch with his clubs—­”

“I know a girl,” broke in Gatewood excitedly, laying his arm on Kerns’s to detain him; but Kerns slid sideways through the door with a smile so noncommittal that Mrs. Gatewood laughed again and, linking her arm in her husband’s, faced partly toward him.  This maneuver, and the slightest pressure of her shoulder, obliged her husband to begin a turning movement, so that Kerns might reasonably make his escape in the middle of Gatewood’s sentence; which he did with nimble and circumspect agility.

“I—­I know a—­” began Gatewood desperately, twisting his head over his shoulder, only to hear the deadened patter of his friend’s feet over the velvet stair carpet and the subdued clang of the front door.

“Isn’t it extraordinary?” he said to his wife.  “I’ve been trying to tell Tommy, every time he comes here, about a girl I know—­just the very girl he ought to marry; and something prevents him from listening every time.”

The attractive young matron beside him turned her face so that her eyes were directly in line with his.

“Did you ever know any people named Manners?” she asked.

“No.  Why?”

“You never knew a girl named Marjorie Manners, did you, John?”

“No.  What about her?”

“You never heard Mr. Kerns speak of her, did you, dear?”

“No, never.  Tommy doesn’t talk about girls.”

“You never heard him speak of a Mrs. Stanley?”

“Never.  Who are these two women?”

“One and the same, dear.  Marjorie Manners married an Englishman named Stanley six years ago.  Do you happen to recollect that Mr. Kerns took his vacation in England six years ago?”