No matter what the weather, she remained cool and good to look at. Nothing could have persuaded her to leave the house in the daytime. She received me with bubbling mirth; she was, it shortly appeared, vastly amused over her husband’s having fled the house. “He’s about done in by the stage during which I corrected the manuscript; he said my jabbering sentences over and over sounded like radios in the distance. He said ‘What is the matter with it? That thing stands up. I can understand it.’ Poor darling! And I said--” she looked askance at me--“I said ‘Suppose I got at you with a comment on your working so hard over a God-awful building that will stand up anyway?’ He thought that this meant I was at last grasping his line of work, and he said ‘Angel girl!’ and was happy. He really doesn’t, you know, take in what I mean when I say ‘I’ll die--die!--if it leaves my hands before it’s as perfect as I can make it!’ Isn’t it odd, Dinah, that a man thinks kisses--love-making--can heal the laceration of the heart over the eternal fact that a book is never up to its conception?” Her lifted eyes were breath-taking. Gazing into them, Nicholas had probably not heard a word she said. And she might at this moment have been making love to him, the tone of her voice was so thrilling. But underneath her lightness, her gaiety--and no one could be more lightly gay than Eva in certain moods--I felt that there was something else. I waited. “Did you know,” she questioned me, “that Nick is playing the stock market? Oh, not plunging; he says he went in ‘not enough to ruin us if I lose, but enough to make us if I win.’ Tony Bloodgood is managing it for him. Nick says his mother is disgustedly shocked, believing as she does that the only sound value is land. But as for me, when he told me I rushed at him and kissed him. And would you believe it, Dinah, although he is the one who is speculating, he was profoundly disgusted by my delight! He accused me again of loving money. Oh--we aren’t beyond quarrelling over everything that comes up, in spite of----” “In spite of what?”