Her lips moved: was it possible that she muttered? I followed the dart of her eyes as she stabbed with them a building in process of blatant construction. Her mutter had consisted of two short, sharp ejaculations, and embodied her ideas on progress. “Humph! Indeed!” This new architecture, which must have affronted her taste because of its difference from the red brick and white trim of her New York, was partly of her son’s making. She could not but feel that, in pursuing his ambition to build greatly, he had fallen into vagary. New York had been a pleasant town. By day the air had been clear and good to breathe, and by night a clean and intimate moon had looked down on family life. These days, the moon came up only to be faded by the vulgarity of beacons on spiky towers. The moon flinched: as she flinched: as she could wish that her son flinched.

The ringing sound of hoofs beat defiantly against the steady drone of motors rolling in two solid columns up and down the Avenue, and the snub nose of the perfect Higginson rose in air polluted by carbon monoxide.

Charles Glidden had lost no urbanity since I had last seen him. He had only one surprise up his sleeve: he was prepared to talk, and to talk about Eva, and it only required my question of how she was making out with the Van Suydams to bring it about. “I think it’s rather funny that she married that particular man,” I gurgled, with Mrs. Van Suydam in my mind’s eye.

He made the concession to his previous manner of turning upon me an opaque regard. “I never try to alter conditions amongst my friends. Diseases are so much more interesting than remedies.” This was as near the line of his intention as was usually got out of him.

“Ah that’s unfair to me,” I expostulated. “I meant no slur on Eva; it wasn’t necessary to throw me off a track.”

“But you’re so ambiguous in your talk,” he objected. However, he committed himself. “I think he’s a dreadful fellow. Of course, she revolts me, occasionally. What does she want? What is she reaching for? And what--and this is the interesting point--is she trying to do with this man she married?”

“I wish I knew,” I sighed.

“She herself doesn’t know. And what at best,” he lamented, “can we believe of what people tell us of themselves? There’s no compulsion on them to tell the truth--if they know it. You will have to judge by Eva’s actions. And the only consistent thing about her--the only thing running in a straight line dead ahead to a positive aim--is her work. The quality of her work never fluctuates; the quality of her social ambition, and the ambition, if one might so call it, of her heart, is influenced to an extraordinary degree by the subject matter of her books. Did you ever notice that she writes only of people living, with propriety, in old Georgian houses? There you are,” he laughed. “She writes her Georgian house, and then wishes with all her heart to live in it.”

I demanded to know why she was not, then, content? I reminded him that she had a Victorian mother-in-law living in a Georgian house. “And yet, since my return I’m hearing nothing but hints of trouble.”

He assured me that he was endeavouring to make me see it. “She reverses the custom about her cake: when she gets it she doesn’t wish to eat it because no longer does she understand why in the first place she wanted it.”

I sighed that she got herself into hopeless complications, and at once he was overwhelmed with masculine distaste. “Don’t try to ‘help’.” His smile could be nothing but an amiable sneer.

I was impatient. “Then what’s the answer?”

“Why do women invariably demand an answer? Some problems have none.” The process of selecting our meal took his mind off Eva, and I sat wondering if he would come back to it. He did, with an evident determination to polish it off for all time. “All I can tell you is: keep your eyes open. Your ears will be filled by your friends. Not long ago, Eva said to me, ‘Can’t you see that his attitude does something to me? I’m not by nature a shrew.’ ‘Who knows?’ I asked her. Have you ever noticed that if you speak personally to her she is startled? I’m no chemist. In the course of my education, I detested chemistry. But I happen to think of it: doesn’t marriage start combinations bubbling in a retort? Correct me if my terms aren’t scientific. Fellows who find out all sorts of things about the stars in connection with our souls, not to mention our intestines, make me faintly sick. Well, then, my dear Dinah, it’s conceivable that Eva’s mother-in-law might be heated in a test tube and never bubble into a poison. See what I mean?”

I admitted that I did not see. “Do you mean that Eva has bubbled into a poisonous person? Because I don’t believe it.”

He studied me, his eyes abstractedly without, on their part, the poison of human emotion. “Why don’t you ask her husband?”

“You are against it, then!”

He dropped into my turmoil “Why discuss this?”

I insisted: “It isn’t idle curiosity on my part.”

He said smoothly that of course it was not.

“She’s so sweet!” I regretted.

“She’s so weak,” he countered. “For all her talk, she lets him bully her. You should have seen him dragging her--all protests, half-way in hysterics--from a dinner given for her, because his mother was giving a reception for her later on and Van Suydam thought it discourteous for them to be absent when the first guests arrived. I mean--it was discourteous: but she’s Eva Litchfield, and some leeway must be allowed her.” He regretted that she did not choose her actions with the taste she displayed in her choice of words. If she behaved with the exquisiteness of her characters, she and her husband would make out. “He is as punctilious as she should be, and doesn’t see that she would truckle at once to a man who hit her a good smacking blow between the eyes. Women like it. Why do you laugh?”

I laughed because once upon a time Eva had said the same thing. She said that the smaller in size the woman the more she speculated about force, the more finical her tastes the stronger her curiosity about brutality. Men, she said, went at it by contraries: they were apt to fight a large woman who dreamed of a knight. I said to him: “Go on? You were saying that he dragged her off by force?”

“In the line of polished pushing. I rather suspect that he gave away his underlying motive in what he said to her as he held her wrap. She had been protesting that what she needed was contact with other writers, and he said: ‘I’m jealous of everything. I’m jealous of the sky that looks down on you. I’m jealous of the air that blows on your cheek.’ I had hopes of him; it occurred to me that, with this line, he might come far enough to really appreciate Eva’s own unerring selection of the right word--unless she’s telling her troubles with him: then, you would be surprised to find out how disgustingly sentimental she is. She told me of some love passages between them. She will of course tell you. But she may tell you other passages, and this was so amusing. She said she went to his study to see if he was angry--she had probably been outrageous to the poor devil--and she said he was put out because she then jumped up from his ardent caresses to answer the telephone. She was genuinely astonished at his irritation. Women act like gadflies: they never let a man alone when he is irritated. She appears to have come back at it, standing and simply smiling. He tried to hold out--must have had some lurking idea of teaching her a lesson; but she assures me that at the touch of her he always loses his head. And when he gasped--silly of him, where it’s a question of Eva--that she must love him always, she merely said that his workroom was so untidy. She told me this because she was scoring a point against him: he had drawn a mark on her brow with a stick of charcoal and said that she could never get away from his brand--that she belonged to him. Being Eva, she took this badly; she said, ‘You can’t shackle my mind! You can’t put your mark on my brain!’ It appears that as they were hotly arguing this, the telephone rang again, and she rushed away to answer it.”

I wailed: “If he doesn’t understand Eva better than to even play at branding her----!”

He said: “I have no use for women in fact, although theoretically I admire the pretty dears. Eva didn’t see, as you don’t see, how amusing it is that for the second time she outraged him by rushing to answer the telephone.”

Side by side on the divan encircling the room, we dropped into bodily comfort; and bodily comfort makes a man talk. At last I protested: everyone, I said, brought it around to Eva’s mother-in-law; was she necessarily so a part of the situation? To be sure, I mused, her immobility would have a disastrous effect on Eva’s nerves. He contradicted me: “Mrs. Van Suydam’s composure is the sum of her sense of what is due her position multiplied by her inflexible will. You’ll find that Eva appreciates her; I’ve always felt that her admiration for the mother had much to do with her falling in love with the son. She met Mrs. Van Suydam at the critical moment. She met her the day the chap asked her to marry him.”