“What did he say to that?”

Claire resumed the combing of her silken hair, and smiled a slow smile at me. “‘You may trust me, Douglas,’ I said.  ’I swear I’ll not tell a living soul!’”

“Of course,” I remarked, appreciatively, “that means he said he’d come!”

“I haven’t told you!” was the reply.

8.  I knew that I had only to wait for Claire to tell me the rest of the story.  But her mind went off on another tack.  “Sylvia’s going to have a baby,” she remarked, suddenly.

“That ought to please her husband,” I said.

“You can see him beginning to swell with paternal pride!—­so Jack said.  He sent for a bottle of some famous kind of champagne that he has, to celebrate the new ‘millionaire baby.’ (They used to call Douglas that, once upon a time.) Before they got through, they had made it triplets.  Jack says Douglas is the one man in New York who can afford them.”

“Your friend Jack seems to be what they call a wag,” I commented.

“It isn’t everybody that Douglas will let carry on with him like that.  He takes himself seriously, as a rule.  And he expects to take the new baby seriously.”

“It generally binds a man tighter to his wife, don’t you think?”

I watched her closely, and saw her smile at my naiveté.  “No,” she said, “I don’t.  It leaves them restless.  It’s a bore all round.”

I did not dispute her authority; she ought to know her husbands, I thought.

She was facing the mirror, putting up her hair; and in the midst of the operation she laughed.  “All that evening, while we were having a jolly time at Jack Taylor’s, Larry was here waiting.”

“Then no wonder you had a row!” I said.

“He hadn’t told me he was coming.  And was I to sit here all night alone?  It’s always the same—­I never knew a man who really in his heart was willing for you to have any friends, or any sort of good time without him.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “he’s afraid you mightn’t be true to him.”  I meant this for a jest, of the sort that Claire and her friends would appreciate.  Little did I foresee where it was to lead us!

I remember how once on the farm my husband had a lot of dynamite, blasting out stumps; and my emotions when I discovered the children innocently playing with a stick of it.  Something like these children I seem now to myself, looking back on this visit to Claire, and our talk.

“You know,” she observed, without smiling, “Larry’s got a bee in his hat.  I’ve seen men who were jealous, and kept watch over women, but never one that was obsessed like him.”

“What’s it about?”

“He’s been reading a book about diseases, and he tells me tales about what may happen to me, and what may happen to him.  When you’ve listened a while, you can see microbes crawling all over the walls of the room.”

“Well——­” I began.