He made the concession to his previous manner of turning upon me an opaque regard. “I never try to alter conditions amongst my friends. Diseases are so much more interesting than remedies.” This was as near the line of his intention as was usually got out of him. “Ah that’s unfair to me,” I expostulated. “I meant no slur on Eva; it wasn’t necessary to throw me off a track.” “But you’re so ambiguous in your talk,” he objected. However, he committed himself. “I think he’s a dreadful fellow. Of course, she revolts me, occasionally. What does she want? What is she reaching for? And what--and this is the interesting point--is she trying to do with this man she married?” “I wish I knew,” I sighed. “She herself doesn’t know. And what at best,” he lamented, “can we believe of what people tell us of themselves? There’s no compulsion on them to tell the truth--if they know it. You will have to judge by Eva’s actions. And the only consistent thing about her--the only thing running in a straight line dead ahead to a positive aim--is her work. The quality of her work never fluctuates; the quality of her social ambition, and the ambition, if one might so call it, of her heart, is influenced to an extraordinary degree by the subject matter of her books. Did you ever notice that she writes only of people living, with propriety, in old Georgian houses? There you are,” he laughed. “She writes her Georgian house, and then wishes with all her heart to live in it.” I demanded to know why she was not, then, content? I reminded him that she had a Victorian mother-in-law living in a Georgian house. “And yet, since my return I’m hearing nothing but hints of trouble.” He assured me that he was endeavouring to make me see it. “She reverses the custom about her cake: when she gets it she doesn’t wish to eat it because no longer does she understand why in the first place she wanted it.” I sighed that she got herself into hopeless complications, and at once he was overwhelmed with masculine distaste. “Don’t try to ‘help’.” His smile could be nothing but an amiable sneer. I was impatient. “Then what’s the answer?”