She was leaning back comfortably in a nest of cushions, in her very latest gown, with a most becoming light falling on her from the tall, yellow-shaded lamp.

He was facing her—­astride his chair, in a position man has loved since creation.

He was just thinking that his wife had never looked handsomer, finer, in fact, in all her life—­quite the satisfactory, all-round, desirable sort of a woman a man’s wife ought to be.

She was wondering if he would ever be any less attractive to all women than he was now at forty-two—­or any better able to resist his own power.

As she put her coffee cup back on the tiny table at her elbow, he leaned forward, and picked up a book which lay open on a chair near him, and carelessly glanced at it.

“Schopenhauer,” and he wrinkled his brows and glanced half whimsically down the page.  “I never can get used to a woman reading that stuff—­and in French, at that.  If you took it up to perfect your German there would be some sense in it.”

Mrs. Shattuck did not reply.  When a moment later, she did speak it was to ignore his remark utterly, and ask: 

“The Kaiser Wilhelm got off in good season this morning—­speaking of German things?”

“Oh, yes,” was the indifferent reply, “at ten o’clock, quite promptly.”

“I suppose she was comfortable, and that you explained why I could not come?”

“Certainly.  One of your beastly head-aches.  She understood.”

“Thank you.”

Shattuck yawned lazily, and changed the subject, which did not seem to interest him.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked, still turning the leaves of the book he held, “that this pleases you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, amuses you?  Instructs you, if you like that better?”

“No, I mean to say simply—­since you insist—­that he speaks the truth, and there are some—­even among women—­who must know the truth and abide by it.”

“Well, thank Heaven,” said the man, pulling at his cigar, “that most women are more emotional than intelligent—­as Nature meant them to be.”

Mrs. Shattuck examined her daintily polished nails, rubbed them carefully on the palm of her hand, as women have a trick of doing, and then polished them on her lace handkerchief, before she said, “Yes, it is a pity that we are not all like that,—­a very great pity—­for our own sakes.  Yet, unluckily, some of us will think.”

“But the thinking woman is so rarely logical, so unable to take life impersonally, that Schopenhauer does her no good.  He only fills her mind with errors, mistrust, unhappiness.”

“You men always argue that way with women—­as if life were not the same for us as for you.  Pass me the book.  I wager that I can open it at random, and that you cannot deny the truth of the first sentence I read.”

He passed her the book.