“If you can’t get a husband for yourself,” said she, “you might at least let other women’s husbands alone!”

She was vulgar, but she was so wild with jealousy that I suppose vulgarity ought to be forgiven her.  I hardly know myself how I managed it, but, somehow, I got the poor thing out of the room and the house and into the cool night air, and then I talked to her, and fairly made her be quiet and listen.  I told her that Ned Temple had made love to me when he was just out of petticoats and I was in short dresses.  I stretched or shortened the truth a little, but it was a case of necessity.  Then I intimated that I never would have married Ned Temple, anyway, and that worked beautifully.  She turned upon me in such a delightfully inconsequent fashion and demanded to know what I expected, and declared her husband was good enough for any woman.  Then I said I did not doubt that, and hinted that other women might have had their romances, even if they did not marry.  That immediately interested her.  She stared at me, and said, with the most innocent impertinence, that my brother’s wife had intimated that I had had an unhappy love-affair when I was a girl.  I did not think that Cyrus had told Ada, but I suppose a man has to tell his wife everything.

I hedged about the unhappy love-affair, but the first thing I knew the poor, distracted woman was sobbing on my shoulder as we stood in front of her gate, and saying that she was so sorry, but her whole life was bound up in her husband, and I was so beautiful and had so much style, and she knew what a dowdy she was, and she could not blame poor Ned if—­But I hushed her.

“Your husband has no more idea of caring for another woman besides you than that moon has of travelling around another world,” said I; “and you are a fool if you think so; and if you are dowdy it is your own fault.  If you have such a good husband you owe it to him not to be dowdy.  I know you keep his house beautifully, but any man would rather have his wife look well than his house, if he is worth anything at all.”

Then she gasped out that she wished she knew how to do up her hair like mine.  It was all highly ridiculous, but it actually ended in my going into the Temple house and showing Ned’s wife how to do up her hair like mine.  She looked like another woman when it was puffed softly over her forehead—­she has quite pretty brown hair.  Then I taught her how to put on her corset and pin her shirt-waist taut in front and her skirt behind.  Ned was not to be home until late, and there was plenty of time.  It ended in her fairly purring around me, and saying how sorry she was, and ashamed, that she had been so foolish, and all the time casting little covert, conceited glances at herself in the looking-glass.  Finally I kissed her and she kissed me, and I went home.  I don’t really see what more a woman could have done for a rival who had supplanted her.  But this revelation makes me more sorry than ever