He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.” He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife, and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat. While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of your work----” Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know anything about architecture?” Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt but that, with inspiration----” “Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and never can, understand each other’s aims?” I said to myself--lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a whisper of desertion.