Florence’s mouth seemed to tear her face when she laughed, as she did now, with complete abandonment. “Add to that the one excruciating comment on us that Van Suydam has been known to make. He said--according to Eva--‘Then it’s a labour union, and I’m a scab and liable to get hurt?’ Eva said she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the way to wherever they were going. Eva, poor devil, doesn’t think it amusing that she tells us these things.” One would have taken her for a different woman from the brooding replica of the antique who so short a while ago had sat looking at who knows what in the fire. I wanted to know, I said, what it all came down to. It appeared, then, that upon several occasions Eva had attempted what amounted to explanations, or apologies, Florence reported. “She says, in extenuation of her irritation with him, that her husband has a trick of being verbally frolicsome, and it upsets her. Yet she was upset when, in the days immediately following their marriage, he insisted on making love to her whenever he caught sight of her. She told us, at the time, that the love-making made her fractious because it got in the way of her work. The truth is, she wants him to be always on tap, in a way of speaking: ready to follow her lead, turning on the flow of his adoration and turning it off as she indicates. But mainly, I believe, she objects to his being mentally frolicsome about things that she has said and done. She has a curious lack of all sense of proportion.” She meditated, again staring into the fire. “Do you know, Dinah, I think you won’t find her changed in any particular by this experiment. He--Van Suydam--is himself doing all the changing.” I said that I took this absence of change in Eva for granted. “She has, absolutely, the correct objectiveness of the creative worker.” “She has nothing of the sort. She worries all the time over her association with her husband,” rejoined Florence. Spencer Mapes was once more at the window, tapping on the panes in a maddening way. “Florence, dearest,” chuckled Pomeroy, “it’s so amazing that none of you see it! She knows that she’s a personage. Her peculiar charm would be spoiled if she were humorous about herself. She knows that her part is to skim through life like a bird, or to hang on the wall like a picture.” Florence, however, was not light-hearted about it. “What Eva needs--what we all need, and what Nicholas Van Suydam has--is the feeling of family life, our own family life, just around the corner to walk in on any minute we feel the need of its spiritual boost. Mark my words: it won’t be Van Suydam who will smash in the end. He’ll change, but he won’t smash up for once and all. He doesn’t have to take a train to go home; he can put out his hand and touch it.” This was disturbing: because I did not wish to believe those things which I did believe. “You think, then, that we’d all be better off at home?”