After they had washed the dishes together she made him comfortable in the big chair, and even put a blossoming hyacinth on the table beside him, so he could smell it now and then.  Then she sat down on a hassock at his feet, with her back to the fire, and, flecking off the ashes of her cigarette over her shoulder, she talked a friendly trickle of funny stories; Maurice, smoking, too, thought how comfortable he was, and how pleasant it was to have a girl like Lily to talk to.  Once or twice he laughed uproariously at some giggling joke.  “She has lots of fun in her,” he reflected; “and she’s a bully cook; and her hair is mighty pretty....  Say, Lily, don’t you want to trim my cuff?  It’s scratching me to death.”

“You bet I do!” Lily said, and got her little shiny scissors and trimmed the broken edge of a worn-out cuff that Eleanor had never noticed.

He felt her small, warm fingers on his hand, and had a sense of comfort that made him almost forget Eleanor.  “It would serve her right if I took Lily on,” he thought.  But he had not the remotest intention of taking Lily on!  He only played with the idea, because the impossible reality would serve Eleanor right.

It was a month or two later, on the rebound of another dreariness with Eleanor, that the reality came, and he did “take Lily on.”  When he did so, no one could have been more astonished—­under his dismay and horror—­than Maurice.

Unless it was Lily?  She had been so certain that he had no ulterior purpose, and so completely satisfied with her own way of living, that her rather snuggling friendliness with him was as honest as a boy’s.  Her surprise at her own mistake showed how genuine her intention of straightness really was.  When he came, once or twice to see her, he called her Lily, and she called him “Curt,” and they joked together like two playfellows,—­except when he was too gloomy to joke.  But it was his gloominess that made her feel sure there was nothing but friendliness in his calls.  She was not curious about him; she knew he was married, but she never guessed that his preoccupation—­during the spring Maurice was very preoccupied with his own wretchedness and given to those cynical fancies about “theater fires";—­was due to the fact that he and his wife didn’t get along.  She merely supposed that, like most of her “gentlemen friends,” “Curt” didn’t talk about his wife.  But, unlike the gentlemen of her world he was, apparently, a husband whose acquaintance with her had its limits.  So they were both astonished....

But when Maurice discovered that such acquaintance had also its risks, the shock was agonizing.  He was overwhelmed with disgust and shame.  Once, at his desk, brooding over what had happened, his whipping instinct of truthfulness roused a sudden, frantic impulse in him to go home and confess to Eleanor, and ask her to forgive him.  She never would, of course!  No woman would; Eleanor least of all.  But oh, if he only could tell her!  As he couldn’t,