Challenged, however, Mrs. Fisher did fasten it on to a sentence.  “Really am I to understand,” she asked, “that you propose to reserve the one spare-room for the exclusive use of your own family?”

“He isn’t my own family,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “He’s my husband.  You see—­”

“I see nothing,” Mrs. Fisher could not this time refrain from interrupting—­for what an intolerable trick.  “At the most I hear, and that reluctantly.”

But Mrs. Wilkins, as impervious to rebuke as Mrs. Fisher had feared, immediately repeated the tiresome formula and launched out into a long and excessively indelicate speech about the best place for the person she called Mellersh to sleep in.

Mellersh—­Mrs. Fisher, remembering the Thomases and Johns and Alfreds and Roberts of her day, plain names that yet had all become glorious, thought it sheer affection to be christened Mellersh—­was, it seemed, Mrs. Wilkins’s husband, and therefore his place was clearly indicated.  Why this talk?  She herself, as if foreseeing his arrival, had had a second bed put in Mrs. Wilkins’s room.  There were certain things in life which were never talked about but only done.  Most things connected with husbands were not talked about; and to have a whole dinner-table taken up with a discussion as to where one of them should sleep was an affront to the decencies.  How and where husbands slept should be known only to their wives.  Sometimes it was not known to them, and then the marriage had less happy moments; but these moments were not talked about either; the decencies continued to be preserved.  At least, it was so in her day.  To have to hear whether Mr. Wilkins should or should not sleep with Mrs. Wilkins, and the reasons why he should and the reasons why he shouldn’t, was both uninteresting and indelicate.

She might have succeeded in imposing propriety and changing the conversation if it had not been for Lady Caroline.  Lady Caroline encouraged Mrs. Wilkins, and threw herself into the discussion with every bit as much unreserved as Mrs. Wilkins herself.  No doubt she was impelled on this occasion by Chianti, but whatever the reason there it was.  And, characteristically, Lady Caroline was all for Mr. Wilkins being given the solitary spare-room.  She took that for granted.  Any other arrangement would be impossible, she said; her expression was, Barbarous.  Had she never read her Bible, Mrs. Fisher was tempted to inquire—­And they two shall be one flesh?  Clearly also, then, one room.  But Mrs. Fisher did not inquire.  She did not care even to allude to such texts to some one unmarried.