She paused long enough to take a tentative sip or two of boiling hot tea.  But the way she had hung up the ending to her sentence, told them she wasn’t through with the topic yet.

“It’s funny about that, too,” she went on, “because really, we see each other so much and have known each other so long, that I know Martin’s—­repertory, about as well as Frederica.  I mean, it isn’t like Walter Mill, when he was just back from the Legation at Pekin, or even like Jimmy Wallace, who spends half his time playing around with all sorts of impossible people—­chorus-girls and such, and tells you queer stories about them.  There’s something besides the—­familiarness that makes husbands dull.  And that’s what makes Bertie amusing.”

“Oh, of course,” said Frederica, “everybody likes to flirt—­whether they have to or not.”

“Have to?” Rose echoed.  She didn’t want to miss anything.

Frederica hesitated.  Then, rather tentatively, began her exegesis.

“Why, there are a lot of women—­especially of our sort, I suppose, who are always ... well, it’s like taking your own temperature—­sticking a thermometer into their mouths and looking at it.  They think they know how they ought to feel about certain things, and they’re always looking to see if they do.  And when they don’t, they think their emotional natures are being starved, or some silly thing like that.  And of course, if you’re that way, you’re always trying experiments, just the way people do with health foods.  In the end, they generally settle on Bertie.  He’s perfectly safe, you know—­just as anxious as they are not to do anything really outrageous.  Bertie keeps them in a pleasant sort of flutter, and maybe he does them good.  I don’t know.—­Drink your tea, Violet.  We’ve got to run.”

That was explicit enough anyway.  But it didn’t solve Rose’s problem—­broadened and deepened it rather, and gave it a greater basis of reality.  It was silly, of course, always to be asking yourself questions.  But after all, you didn’t question a thing that wasn’t questionable.  There had been no necessity for a compromise between romance and reality in her own case.  She hadn’t any need of a thermometer.  Why had they?

Of course she knew well enough that marriage was not always the blissful transformation it had been for her.  There were unhappy marriages.  There were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal drunken husbands, who had to be divorced.  And equally, too, there were cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was the unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels.  She knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes somewhere.  Only, it hadn’t occurred to her to identify them with people of her own acquaintance.) But the idea had been that, barring these tragic and disastrous types, marriage was a state whose happy satisfactoriness could, more or less, be taken for granted.