“A real addition to our family,” said Miss Ladd.

The bond salesman said, “I wonder if he’ll go to the ball game with me on Saturday?  I’ll get the tickets.”

The school-teacher said, “He’s awfully good looking.”

The widow’s comment was only, “Nice boy.”

Upstairs in their own room, Maurice said:  “What pleasant people!  Nelly, let’s get some fun out of this; don’t dash up here the minute you swallow your food!”

She wondered, silently, how he could call them “pleasant”!  To her they were all rather common, pushing persons, who wanted to talk to Maurice.  But as her one desire was to do what he liked, she really did try to help him “get some fun out of them.”  Every night at dinner she smiled laboriously when he teased the teacher, and she listened to the elderly woman in mourning, whose clever talk was so absorbing to Maurice that sometimes he didn’t hear his wife speaking to him!  Yes; Eleanor tried.  Yet, in less than a month Maurice found himself beside a boarder of his own sex, instead of Mrs. Davis, and saw that the school-teacher was too far down the table for jokes.  When he asked why their seats had been changed, Eleanor said she had felt a draught—­which caused the widow to smile, and write on a piece of paper an arithmetical statement:  “Selfishness + vanity — humor = jealousy.”  She handed it to the teacher, who laughed and shrugged her shoulders: 

“But she’s awfully in love with him,” she conceded, under her breath.

The older woman shook her head:  “No, my dear; she isn’t.  No jealous woman knows the meaning of love.”

But Eleanor did not see Miss Moore’s contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis’s grave glance.  One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that they don’t know how amusing—­or else boring—­or else irritating—­they are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world!  Eleanor had no idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found her ridiculous.  She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them—­which meant that her society “wasn’t enough for him “!  So she tried to make it enough for him.  At dinner she talked to him so animatedly (and so personally) that no one else could get a word in edgewise.  Dinner over, she was uneasy until she had dragged her eager-eyed young husband up to the desert island of their third-floor front—­a dingy room, with a black-marble mantelpiece, and a worn and frowzy carpet.  There were some steel engravings, dim under their old glasses, on the wall,—­Evangeline, and Lincoln’s Cabinet, and Daniel Webster in a rumpled shirt and a long swallowtail;—­all of which Eleanor’s looking-glass and the mirrored doors of a black-walnut wardrobe, reflected in multiplying dullness.