“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good, they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards our pane of glass to say goodbye--they were punctilious about this ceremony--he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas: I’ve got to have another drink!” Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she wasn’t giving me peace?” I found that I had crouched back in my chair--crouching away from what I had loosed in him. “It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things up--arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously: ‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it--that only a man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had to listen to that God-awful term ‘sensible woman’ applied to her she would---- Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have this row.”