I waited to see if anyone else would comment. They did not; they had heard it before. So I put it to Winnie that I had got no impression of a scene in what she had told. Winnie finished her cocktail in such haste that she was further delayed by a fit of choking. With a flap of her hand she begged me to wait a minute; she was coming to it. With the further flourish of her now empty glass she might have been dashing her challenge into the face of Eva’s defiant husband. “It seems that he made fun of our two names--Addis’ and mine--over our front doorbell. It seems that it’s a bone of contention between them that on her books Eva still uses her maiden name alone.” Florence the unmarried smiled. “Why do you suppose Eva told you?” she speculated. Winnie gloated over the fact that, so she said, one could always get things out of Eva. “And how can you take him, after all--that husband of hers? He’s made no attempt to fit into the circle of Eva’s friends. Eva told us that he said he believed marriage should be an abdication of this willingness to listen to the advice of friends. I do think,” Winnie exclaimed, “that smoking a pipe gives a man an advantage over us; and they know it, the nasty things! Nicholas Van Suydam stretched out his long legs and leaned back and clenched that pipe stem between his teeth and grinned at us; and when I asked point-blank what was on his mind he mumbled around the filthy pipe that he’d been saying to himself ‘My man, if ever there was a time in your life when you had better sit tight, this is it!’” “Ah splendid!” murmured Pomeroy. Winnie pushed her complaint. Eva, it seems, had said briskly “Nick darling, we’ve got to get used to things. And hadn’t we better start in by making up our minds to let each other’s work alone?” I drawled: “I think he sounds rather attractive.” “Oh well,” Winnie advanced uneasily, “I acknowledge that we were talking about Eva’s affairs.” “With both of them present--of course?” “Eva didn’t object,” said Winnie with relief. “You know her. Spence came in about that time, and said--you know, Spence, you can be counted on to say it!--that she was something-or-other-delicate and rare, and she positively purred. She was taken by the idea of having attributed to her an unapproachable perfection.” Spencer Mapes said: “How do you know I don’t believe it?”