replied unanswerably. Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments. "After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it." She shrugged in answer to my silence. "What else is it, do you think? It means that Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were pretty. I suppose he's had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain one's a change."

"Kitty! Kitty! how can you!"

But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice.

"This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. "He's pretending."

I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body, was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent.

Chris spoke from the darkness.

"Jenny!" I let her go. He came in and stood over us, running his hand through his hair unhappily. "Let's all be decent to each other," he said heavily. "It's all such a muddle, and it's so rotten for all of us—"

Kitty shook herself neat and stood up.

"Why don't you say, 'Jenny, you mustn't be rude to visitors'? It's how you feel, I know." She gathered up her needlework. "I'm going to bed. It's been a horrid night."

She spoke so pathetically, like a child who hasn't enjoyed a party as much as it had thought it would, that both of us felt a stir of tenderness toward her as she left the room. We smiled sadly at each other as we sat down by the fire, and I perceived that, perhaps because I was flushed and looked younger, he felt more intimate with me than he had yet done since his return. Indeed, in the warm, friendly silence that followed he was like a patient when tiring visitors have gone and he is left alone with his trusted nurse; smiled under drooped lids and then paid me the high compliment of disregard. His limbs relaxed, he sank back into his chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was ready at that moment when thought intruded into his drowsings and his face began to twitch. I asked:

"You can't remember her at all?"

"Oh, yes," he said, without raising his 

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