“Pray for strength,” Pomeroy advised me. “For this is nothing to how you’ll feel when Eva gets at you with her own inner secret side of it.” They shouted at me that they had been right in assuming that Eva would have no objection to being dissected by us. And, advancing her apology for Eva more tentatively than was her habit, Florence took it up. “Sit down, Dinah,” she begged. “I’m not going to abuse Eva. And, incidentally, I don’t acknowledge the justice of your attitude of holier than thou. You can’t deny several points. You can’t deny that you never get on your ear until after you’ve heard all we have to tell you: and you can’t deny that Eva herself in her distastes is almost inhumane. She’s harsh in her condemnations of what life has brought out in others. And I think that part of the trouble now is that she’s afraid of the effects of life on herself if she lets go and turns human.” Leaning over in her favourite position, her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands, she stared into the fire with her sullen resentment against something that only she knew. The long, racy lines of her figure were so much lovelier than her face that at the moment Florence presented her greatest contradiction. “She’s harried--like a poor wild thing--and I, for one, am sorry for her. But to hell with it! Why should I worry myself?” When Florence cursed it was in a curiously deadened voice that carried her ultimate conviction. She continued to worry herself, of course. “Spence says--but I have my reason for stating that he doesn’t think it--that her fastidiousness is lack of feeling. It’s all in her head, he holds. And because she happens to have a thinnish voice he puts that, too, down to a thinness of temperament. And I don’t believe a word of it. To docket a woman isn’t so easy as all that.” She paused to smile at Mapes. “Don’t be ashamed of being in love with Eva, Spence. You’re a bloodless radish, and for you to so plunge into the maelstrom of human failings is a comfort to your friends. Wasn’t radish,” she mused, “what Eva’s husband called all you men? She told us about it--remember?” Mapes was disdainful. “Of course he selected the wrong simile. He meant to say turnip. And if you want to recall what Eva told us, how about that bit to the effect that he said he’d see everything once, and her counter remark that her friends were never guilty of triteness? I seem to recall her repeating a quite long and fiery speech she made to him, in which she said that of course he was splendid in his own line but that we weren’t tolerant of platitudes. Which all of you might bear in mind, as it would be sad to fall below Eva’s praise.”