Eva’s beauty was a slap in Molly’s face, her genius an affront to the lesser gift. She preserved a dashed silence. In the obscurity of the taxi I felt that she waited to spring. “It’s a fortunate thing that you and I didn’t start life as beauties,” she eventually assured me. “I’ve always thought, Dinah, that you don’t fit together. Have you ever noticed that your face isn’t the type that should go with your body--if nature happened to be squeamish, which she isn’t?” She then discounted my amusement. “No use in saying what you were thinking of saying. I know I’m a wreck. It’s only Eva who can work like a slave, and live on a tension, and come out of it looking like an angel.” Eva had, always, looked like an angel. Gossip, sticking to her like pitch, had not spoiled the loveliness of her face. The one woman among us whose love affairs were front page news, shrinking from it, hating it, and always adding to it, there was about Eva a helplessness that made me rush to her defense. I said, now, staring Molly in the eye: “You’ve been insinuating, and have told nothing--which, after all, I remember to be characteristic of you. Come out with it.” “My dear!” she protested. “I’m as crazy over her as you are. How can you think I was going to tell something against her?” “Oh, I’m not going to tell her what you say.” “My love, what a spitfire you’ve become,” she said sweetly. She insisted that she knew nothing definite, that Eva was in no trouble, that, in short, the real trouble had fallen upon her friends; they found it difficult to keep the peace with her new husband, who was an unacceptable nuisance. “It’s a pity,” she commented, “that men no longer beat their wives; so much the most potent means of displaying connubial disapproval--and so much pleasanter for the casual guest, who doesn’t often find himself present during the performance.”