“Why do women invariably demand an answer? Some problems have none.” The process of selecting our meal took his mind off Eva, and I sat wondering if he would come back to it. He did, with an evident determination to polish it off for all time. “All I can tell you is: keep your eyes open. Your ears will be filled by your friends. Not long ago, Eva said to me, ‘Can’t you see that his attitude does something to me? I’m not by nature a shrew.’ ‘Who knows?’ I asked her. Have you ever noticed that if you speak personally to her she is startled? I’m no chemist. In the course of my education, I detested chemistry. But I happen to think of it: doesn’t marriage start combinations bubbling in a retort? Correct me if my terms aren’t scientific. Fellows who find out all sorts of things about the stars in connection with our souls, not to mention our intestines, make me faintly sick. Well, then, my dear Dinah, it’s conceivable that Eva’s mother-in-law might be heated in a test tube and never bubble into a poison. See what I mean?” I admitted that I did not see. “Do you mean that Eva has bubbled into a poisonous person? Because I don’t believe it.” He studied me, his eyes abstractedly without, on their part, the poison of human emotion. “Why don’t you ask her husband?” “You are against it, then!” He dropped into my turmoil “Why discuss this?” I insisted: “It isn’t idle curiosity on my part.” He said smoothly that of course it was not. “She’s so sweet!” I regretted. “She’s so weak,” he countered. “For all her talk, she lets him bully her. You should have seen him dragging her--all protests, half-way in hysterics--from a dinner given for her, because his mother was giving a reception for her later on and Van Suydam thought it discourteous for them to be absent when the first guests arrived. I mean--it was discourteous: but she’s Eva Litchfield, and some leeway must be allowed her.” He regretted that she did not choose her actions with the taste she displayed in her choice of words. If she behaved with the exquisiteness of her characters, she and her husband would make out. “He is as punctilious as she should be, and doesn’t see that she would truckle at once to a man who hit her a good smacking blow between the eyes. Women like it. Why do you laugh?” I laughed because once upon a time Eva had said the same thing. She said that the smaller in size the woman the more she speculated about force, the more finical her tastes the stronger her curiosity about brutality. Men, she said, went at it by contraries: they were apt to fight a large woman who dreamed of a knight. I said to him: “Go on? You were saying that he dragged her off by force?”