And then, on a sudden, Mrs. Cox was grave. One might laugh at the odd ways of men with any woman. It is the universal bond that binds the sex together; the fine lady feels it no less when she condoles with her washer-woman upon a stay-at-home husband,—“Yes, yes, a man in the house all day is dreadfully in the way,”—and their identity of sentiment bridges the difference in fortune. But Mrs. Mar was one with whom you might not only laugh over the foibles of the opposite sex, you might even be grave with her on the same ground—a rarer privilege to the educated woman. “That monthly orgy, that’s such unalloyed delight to Mr. Cox, used to be a time of great interest to me, too,” admitted Mrs. Cox. “Really!” The president of the Valdivia Shakspere Society could hardly believe it of her friend. “Yes. You see, there’s always a great clearance made—a general getting rid of all sorts of accumulations. I used to watch every time when he came to the lower left-hand drawer—” Mrs. Cox smiled faintly as one pitiful of some long-past pain. “Well, what was the matter with the lower left-hand drawer?” “That was where he kept a faded photograph of Ellie Brezee. I used to watch to see if _that_ time he was going to throw it away. He never did.” “Who was Ellie Brezee?” “A sister of Colonel George Brezee—the one that died. That was before you came to California. Mr. Cox was engaged to Ellie when he was nineteen. But, thank goodness, my concern about it is among the things that I’m done with. I don’t any longer sit at home, now, with the tail of my eye on the lower left-hand drawer while Ellie Brezee comes out for her monthly airing.” “Oh, you disposed of Ellie?” “No, oh, no.” “He finally threw the picture away himself?” “No. Only now, I know he never will.” They were silent a moment. “I never _said_ anything, of course; and he never made any secret about it. I didn’t think it any disloyalty to me that he should keep it. At the same time”—she dropped her voice—“the pain the sight of that faded face was to me for years—you think it supremely silly, I suppose. But then _your_ husband doesn’t hoard up the memory of some girl that’s been dead and buried for twenty years, so you can’t understand.” “Yes, I can understand,” Mrs. Mar answered, with an eye that saw through the wall the reconnaissance map of Norton Sound. CHAPTER V