Florence shrugged. She said that she was making no suggestions; for, after all, how could she? She held to the notion that for Eva a divorce would be a disastrous thing. “But she’ll ditch herself yet,” she thought. “Look here, my girl,” I called myself to account, “why can’t you make up your mind that an American is never happy? We’re a chronically dissatisfied race. You know that if any of us were happy we’d lose our celebrated feverish energy--we’d not be forced by a substratum of uneasiness to push ourselves--push, push, push ourselves--to an end that often we can’t see. It’s our dissatisfaction with life that makes us push. It isn’t going to injure Eva’s work, that she’s unhappily married--if she is.” Pomeroy announced that I had been talking to myself for the last five minutes. “Have you ever thought, Dinah darling, of using yourself in a novel? But of course you wouldn’t use what really counts; no woman would.” I said: “Shall we stop this? I’m sick and tired of talking about Eva.” “My lamb,” interrupted Florence, “wouldn’t it be honest if we acknowledged that these days we get together solely to talk about her? And wouldn’t it be more open and above board if you acknowledged that you eat it up? For my part, I’m frank in my avidity. And I want to say, just here, that I know what Eva herself wants; above and beyond being talked about whenever men--and women--are gathered together in her name, she wants the greatest joy ever experienced by a human being, only, in order that she be not shocked, it must be the joy of creatures without bodies.” Mapes stood at the window tapping on the panes his own reply to the beckon of the bare branches that mournfully swung in the wind from the river. He said, speaking over his shoulder as if he concealed his face: “She can’t help it. She’s powerless to change her nature--as are we all. Women with thin treble voices have no power of emotion.” Pomeroy revelled in arguments about the nature of women. “What, then, keeps them going?” “Their excited nerves.” Thus charitably excusing all possible charges against Eva’s treatment of her husband, Mapes at the same time suggested that this treatment was of a refined cruelty. With anticipatory relish, he glanced keenly from one to another of us, gathering up obscure reactions he might have brought about. I knew that he studied us, measuring our relatively tense muscles as indications of how we had drifted since his suggestion which might embrace so many. I noticed that the cocktail shaker made a swift round of the room. I said that I was tired. “It’s all too much. I can sort out some points, but not so many. Everyone of you has a different impression of everyone of--of--suppose we call them Eva and her opponents? And what you’ve been half-way telling is as jumbled as that statement of mine, and my mind is as jumbled as my statement, and--there you are!”