The dinner was on time and excellent; Nellie, decorative and chatty, was promptly in her place. Dinner over, they went to the sitting-room for their coffee. The apartment was very high up, the windows looking over the tree-tops of the Drive, across the Hudson tot he Jersey shore. It was March, and the shore lights wavered in gusts of rain that threatened to turn to snow. The room was warm; Cameron was suffocating; Nellie was serenely unaware. She had eaten well, from her soup through her cheese. There are times when, to a man, a woman's appetite is the last straw. She was tired, she said, but at her ease, and never prettier. "Going out to-night, Joey?" "Yes. Bridge hand around at Gordon's. Want a talk with Gordon about a matter of business." "I like to have things to do in the afternoon, but when night comes"--Nellie smothered a contented yawn--"I love getting into something comfy, and just buzzing round our own lamp." "I must own that I have never found afternoon diversions to be diverting." To save him he could not keep his voice good-natured. He had had a grind of a day, and was dog-tired; it seemed to him she ought to know it and talk about it. "Yes?" Nellie mused. "It was amusing at the club to-day--the Non-descripts." She laughed softly. "It wasn't 'nondescript' to-day, though!" "Some old maid telling you to bring your children up on the country, and throw your husbands out of their jobs?" "What, Joey?" Nellie seemed to bring her thoughts back from a long way off. "Old maid? I should say not! We had a man. We nearly always do. Then everybody comes, and there's more glow. He was an English socialist--I guess he was a socialist. Burne-Jones hair, and a homespun jacket,--loose, and all that,--and a heavy ribbon on his glasses. He talked about the new man." "The--what?" "The new man." Nellie opened her eyes wide, as if her husband puzzled her. "Well--I'm damned!" Nellie broke into sudden mirth. "You were, Joey dear; that is just what you were. You were damned all the way there and back again." Cameron strangled. "Have I the honor to typify the--new creature?" "You're the very image of him, Joey dear." And she smiled upon him as if he were some new moth, in at their window, to buzz round their lamp. "And--this person--?" Nellie became eagerly communicative. "I do wonder if I can make you see him? Tall and dark, and with good-looking, thinnish hands and almost amusing way of playing with his eye-glasses. You know, Joey: the sort of distinguished talk-it-all-out sort of man that just makes men rage. Of course," she went on, largely wise, "he's the sort of socialist to make a real socialist rage, but he's just the thing for clubs." "You often have them?" "Of course," she laughed. "You see, we don't see much of men at home any more. It keeps us from forgetting how you look, and how amusing you may be." Cameron gazed before him into a chaos without words. Nellie was oblivious.