"I believe you said yesterday that you are in the habit of having your own way." She nodded her head. "Well, I am afraid you'll have to come down from your high horse--at least temporarily." "Oh, I see. You--you mean to be very firm and domineering with me." "You must try to see things from my point of--" "Please don't say that!" she flared. "I'm so tired of hearing those words. For the last three years I've been _commanded_ to see things from some one else's point of view, and I'm sick of the expression." "For heaven's sake, don't put me in the same boat with your husband!" She regarded me somewhat frigidly for a moment longer, and then a slow, witching smile crept into her eyes. "I sha'n't," she promised, and laughed outright. "Do forgive me, Mr. Smart. I am such a piggy thing. I'll try to be nice and sensible, and I will be as still as a mouse all the time they're here. But you must promise to come up every day and give me the gossip. You _can_ steal up, can't you? Surreptitiously?" "Clandestinely," I said, gravely. "I really ought to warn you once more about getting yourself involved," she said pointedly. "Oh, I'm quite a safe old party," I assured her. "They couldn't make capital of me." "The grouse was delicious," she said, deliberately changing the subject. Nice divorcees are always doing that. We fell into a discussion of present and future needs; of ways and means for keeping my friends utterly in the dark concerning her presence in the abandoned east wing; and of what we were pleased to allude to as "separate maintenance," employing a phrase that might have been considered distasteful and even banal under ordinary conditions. "I've been trying to recall all of the notable marriages we had in New York three years ago," said I, after she had most engagingly reduced me to a state of subjection in the matter of three or four moot questions that came up for settlement. "You don't seem to fit in with any of the international affairs I can bring to mind." "You promised you wouldn't bother about that, Mr. Smart," she said severely. "Of course you _were_ married in New York?" "In a very nice church just off Fifth Avenue, if that will help you any," she said. "The usual crowd inside the church, and the usual mob outside, all fighting for a glimpse of me in my wedding shroud, and for a chance to see a real Hungarian nobleman. It really was a very magnificent wedding, Mr. Smart." She seemed to be unduly proud of the spectacular sacrifice. A knitted brow revealed the obfuscated condition of my brain. I was thinking very intently, not to say remotely.