“In the line of polished pushing. I rather suspect that he gave away his underlying motive in what he said to her as he held her wrap. She had been protesting that what she needed was contact with other writers, and he said: ‘I’m jealous of everything. I’m jealous of the sky that looks down on you. I’m jealous of the air that blows on your cheek.’ I had hopes of him; it occurred to me that, with this line, he might come far enough to really appreciate Eva’s own unerring selection of the right word--unless she’s telling her troubles with him: then, you would be surprised to find out how disgustingly sentimental she is. She told me of some love passages between them. She will of course tell you. But she may tell you other passages, and this was so amusing. She said she went to his study to see if he was angry--she had probably been outrageous to the poor devil--and she said he was put out because she then jumped up from his ardent caresses to answer the telephone. She was genuinely astonished at his irritation. Women act like gadflies: they never let a man alone when he is irritated. She appears to have come back at it, standing and simply smiling. He tried to hold out--must have had some lurking idea of teaching her a lesson; but she assures me that at the touch of her he always loses his head. And when he gasped--silly of him, where it’s a question of Eva--that she must love him always, she merely said that his workroom was so untidy. She told me this because she was scoring a point against him: he had drawn a mark on her brow with a stick of charcoal and said that she could never get away from his brand--that she belonged to him. Being Eva, she took this badly; she said, ‘You can’t shackle my mind! You can’t put your mark on my brain!’ It appears that as they were hotly arguing this, the telephone rang again, and she rushed away to answer it.” I wailed: “If he doesn’t understand Eva better than to even play at branding her----!” He said: “I have no use for women in fact, although theoretically I admire the pretty dears. Eva didn’t see, as you don’t see, how amusing it is that for the second time she outraged him by rushing to answer the telephone.” Side by side on the divan encircling the room, we dropped into bodily comfort; and bodily comfort makes a man talk. At last I protested: everyone, I said, brought it around to Eva’s mother-in-law; was she necessarily so a part of the situation? To be sure, I mused, her immobility would have a disastrous effect on Eva’s nerves. He contradicted me: “Mrs. Van Suydam’s composure is the sum of her sense of what is due her position multiplied by her inflexible will. You’ll find that Eva appreciates her; I’ve always felt that her admiration for the mother had much to do with her falling in love with the son. She met Mrs. Van Suydam at the critical moment. She met her the day the chap asked her to marry him.” Often his omniscience irritated me. “How can you know?”