The Biltons, it appeared, had been the opposite of the Clouston-Sacks, and had never been separated for a single day during the whole of their married life.  This seemed to the twins very strange, and needing a great deal of explanation.  In order to get light thrown on it the first thing they wanted to find out was how long the marriage had lasted; but Mrs. Bilton was deaf to their inquiries, and having described Mr. Bilton’s last moments and obsequies—­obsequies scheduled by her, she said, with so tender a regard for his memory that she insisted on a horse-drawn hearse instead of the more fashionable automobile conveyance, on the ground that a motor hearse didn’t seem sorry enough even on first speed—­she washed along with an easy flow to descriptions of the dreadfulness of the early days of widowhood, when one’s crepe veil keeps on catching in everything—­chairs, overhanging branches, and passers-by, including it appeared on one occasion a policeman.  She inquired of the twins whether they had ever seen a new-made widow in a wind.  Chicago, she said, was a windy place, and Mr. Bilton passed in its windiest month.  Her long veil, as she proceeded down the streets on the daily constitutional she considered it her duty toward the living to take, for one owes it to one’s friends to keep oneself fit and not give way, was blown hither and thither in the buffeting cross-currents of that uneasy climate, and her walk in the busier streets was a series of entanglements.  Embarrassing entanglements, said Mrs. Bilton.  Fortunately the persons she got caught in were delicacy and sympathy itself; often, indeed, seeming quite overcome by the peculiar poignancy of the situation, covered with confusion, profuse in apologies.  Sometimes the wind would cause her veil for a few moments to rear straight up above her head in a monstrous black column of woe.  Sometimes, if she stopped a moment waiting to cross the street, it would whip round the body of any one who happened to be near, like a cord.  It did this once about the body of the policeman directing the traffic, by whose side she had paused, and she had to walk round him backwards before it could be unwound.  The Chicago evening papers, prompt on the track of a sensation, had caused her friends much painful if only short-lived amazement by coming out with huge equivocal headlines: 

WELL-KNOWN SOCIETY WIDOW AND POLICEMAN CAUGHT TOGETHER

and beginning their description of the occurrence by printing her name in full.  So that for the first sentence or two her friends were a prey to horror and distress, which turned to indignation on discovering there was nothing in it after all.

The twins, their eyes on Mrs. Bilton’s face, their hands clasped round their knees, their bodies sitting on the grass at her feet, occasionally felt as they followed her narrative that they were somehow out of their depth and didn’t quite understand.  It was extraordinarily exasperating to them to be so completely muzzled.  They were accustomed to elucidate points they didn’t understand by immediate inquiry; they had a habit of asking for information, and then delivering comments on it.