“I’m with you!” Maurice said; and Johnny said he didn’t mind; but Eleanor protested.

“You’ll get your skirts wringing wet, Edith.  And—­I thought we were to sit here and sing?”

“Oh, you can sing any old time,” Edith said, lifting the lid of the coffee pot and stirring the brown froth with a convenient stick.

“And I’m just to look on?” Eleanor said.

“Why, wade, if you want to,” her husband said; “It’s safe enough to leave Edith’s things here.”

After that he was too much absorbed in shooing ants off the marmalade to give any thought to his wife.  The luncheon (except to her) was the usual delightful discomfort of balancing coffee cups on uncertain knees, and waving off wasps, and upsetting glasses of water.  Maurice talked about the ball game, and Edith gossiped darkly of her teachers, and Johnny Bennett ate enormously and looked at Edith.

Eleanor neither ate nor gossiped; but she, too, watched Edith—­and listened.  Bingo, in his mistress’s lap, had snarled at Johnny when he took Eleanor’s empty cup away, which led Edith to say that he was jealous.

“I don’t call it ‘jealous,’” Eleanor said, “to be fond of a person.”

“You can’t really be fond of anybody, and be jealous,” Edith announced; “or if you are, it is just Bingoism.”

This brought a quick protest from Eleanor, which was followed by the inevitable discussion; Edith began it by quoting, “’Love forgets self, and jealousy remembers self.’”

Maurice grinned and said nothing—­it was enough for him to see Eleanor hit, hard!  But Johnny protested: 

“If your girl monkeys round with another fellow,” he said, “you have a right to be jealous.”

“Of course,” said Eleanor.

“No, sir!” said Edith.  “You have a right to be unhappy. If the other fellow’s nicer than you—­I mean if he has something that attracts her that you haven’t, of course you’d be unhappy! (though you could get busy and be nice yourself.) Or, if he’s not as nice as you, you’d be unhappy, because you’d be so awfully disappointed in her.  But there’s no jealousy about that kind of thing!  Jealousy is hogging all the love for yourself.  Like Bingo!  And I call it plain garden selfishness—­and no sense, either, because you don’t gain anything by it.  Do you think you do, Maurice? ...  For Heaven’s sake, hand me the sandwiches!”

Maurice didn’t express his thoughts; he just roared with laughter.  Eleanor reddened; Johnny, handing the sandwiches, said that, though Edith generally could reason pretty well—­for a woman—­in this particular matter she was ’way off.

“You are long on logic, Edith,” Maurice agreed; “but short on human nature; (she hasn’t an idea how the shoe fits!).”

“The reason I’m so up on jealousy,” Edith explained, complacently, “is because yesterday, in English Lit., our professor worked off a lot of quotations on us.  Listen to this (only I can’t say just exactly the words!):  ’Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes by fire, yet jealousy’—­oh, what does come next?  Oh yes; I know—­’yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother flames.’”