The room was familiar although in a house that was new to me. It might have been the study in any of Eva’s residences. Over the whole place, seeming to be part of the house itself although it was really Eva’s dressing up of her personality, there hung the scent of tea roses. I told her how delightful I had found the window-boxes, and she gave me an odd look and said that it had been about the window-boxes that she and Nicholas had had one of their first disagreements. “I had forgotten all about the house because I was on a book. And it came out that the geraniums had collapsed in that awful pulpy mess which is one of the horrors of autumn. And he said to me that it was strange I’d talk so much about beauty and not hate the way the geraniums looked. I daresay the sensible course under attack would be to imitate the wild things in the woods: sit motionless until the attacker’s attention has been diverted. But I reply; I always reply. He can be rather hateful, like all equable men.” “Aren’t you happy with him?” I asked at once. She blared her eyes. “Happy--with Nick? Of course I am. That is--I could be, if people let us alone.” “You mean you see too many people? No time to be quietly happy and contented?” “Sentimental as ever!” she teased. “I mean, in plain words, that everyone--Nick’s friends who aren’t mine, and my friends who aren’t his--take a hand in the least thing we do. Of course both sides have been at you about us?” From my smile she knew that this guess was correct, and went on with what she would have called her own side. “Let me tell you that they aren’t the amiable meddlers who beset all newly wed couples. These meddlers are almost malignant--at least, his side of the mob are malignant. But both sides give an impression of concerted action. They give the impression--his side, I mean, of course--of bitterly resenting any appearance on our part of getting on together. They are the prophets howling in the wilderness that they ‘told us so.’ And, if it doesn’t come out the way they prophesied, they will make it.” I asked what she meant by this. It appeared that she meant only her momentary irritation at all people; and this seemed to me to be the passing phase of the last long stretch with the book. I felt relieved, and amused, and vastily aggravated. Today, she was pettish over something that ordinarily she would enjoy. I advanced the contingency that her husband might have had to face the problem of readjusting his life and work to her presence, and at once her face became grave. “That is one of the difficulties. He’s lost, I fear, the abstraction of his ideas.” My mood changed, and I laughed heartily. “How can anyone hold an abstract idea while you are around?” She was indignant. “I should inspire them.” “My dear,” I told her, “you have a way of shattering people. You have a trick of making everyone feel inferior to you.”