“My dear Dinah,” he replied smoothly, “you never use the delicate rapier; do you? Your weapon is the battle-ax.” I said: “What a friend you are!” I pushed through the crowd in pursuit of Eva. But she, on her part, searched for Nicholas. I caught her as she said to him, excitedly, that her brain was on fire, that it burned the inside of her head. She cried to him: “Do you realize that no one considers me? Have you ever stopped to think that everyone conspires to use up my strength?” Had he noticed, she enquired as if it were his fault, that idiot Molly Underhill holding on to her while she told her troubles? “People--” she almost raved--“should keep their troubles to themselves.” Nicholas was mild about it. “Early to bed, for you. You are working yourself up.” With her sudden compunction, she touched his arm. “Poor Nick! It was a sad day for you, when you married me, wasn’t it?” For a time she stood quietly, regarding him with kindliness. Then she shrugged. “But you would do it, you know. All right! That’s that. Find your mother, and we will go home.” It was the next day when I heard from Eva the sequel to the evening. Mrs. Van Suydam had sat erect in the taxi, resisting her natural fatigue. “We shall have a lovely Christmas, children,” she had remarked affably. “And I hope it may be a bracing, biting spell of weather, such as we had--I recall it vividly--the winter Nicholas was born.” Eva’s interruption had been abrupt. “It will be a Christmas of work, for me.” It appears that the elderly lady had protested. Eva had explained with scant courtesy that she must start in at once on her next book, whereupon her mother-in-law had called such a course, “in her condition,” suicidal. “Think of your unborn child,” Mrs. Van Suydam had persisted, driving Eva--so she told me--frantic with her insistence on the necessary sublimation of Eva Litchfield to the child. “Don’t push yourself,” said Mrs. Van Suydam in a voice of stern admonition. Eva said that she herself spoke through set teeth; she was by now in an agony of determination. “I’ll beat that dreadful woman if it takes me years! And that is exactly what I’ve got to do--push myself,” she had finished in a cry on this her instant response to her own doubts. The little house was cozy, and Eva’s study heavy with the scent of the roses that Nicholas kept on her writing-table. They stood looking at each other. Nicholas smiled, she remembered, but she knew that her own face was grave. He was still thinking, she assured me, of the emotion of the day when she had told him that she was going to have a child. Her hand, however, was at once raised against him. “Wait!” Held suspended in his recapture of the lovely mood, he did in fact wait. He was helpless, as are all men, in face of this mystery of the creation of another human being.