Afterwards, I regretted having replied; for I gave her away as I saw her. Also, his smile, which he preserved in its initial spontaneity, made me doubt my motive: was I pleading for Eva or solely striving to inflict a scratch on this immovable, taunting man? I told him that he played upon her weaknesses. I reminded him that, although she did the ugliest things, she was driven by a strong sense of harmony. Ridden by some nervous instinct that she had no great amount of time, she wasted much time in bewailing the world’s misunderstanding of her life: was it good for her that he should so deliberately add to this game of cross purposes? Having blurted out these lucidities, and thinking along lines thus engendered, I stood looking at him in that abstraction which throws a dulling veil over the sight but with the feeling in my flesh that a cat gives me. I wondered how he sprung. He would never do a thing so physically definite as to spring, I told myself. I was certain that he had not taken the constructive step of endeavouring to marry Eva, because, possibly, he had not been able to make up his mind that he could not do without her. His eyes gleamed at me with enjoyment of my suspicions. Doubtless he still devoted all his spare time to hanging around her. I should find him, as we had always found him, at the parties where he knew he would meet her, sitting in sight of her and directing his remarks at, or to, her. In this fashion he played the cat with the worried mouse, letting her out with praise, dragging her back with judiciously placed destructive criticism. He was always faintly derogatory. Faint derogation was in his tone when he asked if I had ever met the man who was now Eva’s husband; his emphasis docketed the marriage with passing experiments. “She insists she did it for love of him,” he said with quiet amusement; his amusement was never hearty. James Pomeroy, who could say coarse things with impunity, once remarked that belly laughter had never escaped Mapes’ chiselled lips. “But, as you know and will never admit, there’s a good deal of the snob in our Eva. She thoroughly believes, poor girl, that what she wants of life is the social security which every now and then she so deliberately chucks overboard.” I said that I had not come back to play blind man’s buff. “I intend to see her tomorrow; and I’ll find out for myself these equivocal secrets at which all of you hint. If there’s anything I detest--” I almost gnashed my teeth at him--“it’s to be played!” His soft laughter, his “My dear Dinah!” brought me to the point whither he had wished to lead me: I asked him what he was trying to do about Eva’s marriage.