“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m making no mystery of it. But I am getting slants--oh, very different ones, I assure you!--on practically everything you’ve done since your marriage; I haven’t seen one person yet who hasn’t at once given their version.” “I apologize for my repetitions,” she said huffily. “Oh, don’t! I’m crazy to hear what you noticed at the parties and the like. You have no idea how fascinating it is, to get all the sides of the prism.” She had a divine disposition. I had never known her to sulk. By the time Mattie had come in with tea for Eva and a cocktail for me, and Eva had called me a toper and had reminded me that hard liquor ages a woman, she was ready to go on sweetly with her tale. “And besides,” she crowed over the others who might have told me the same thing, “they can’t know what I mean to tell you. Wait and see! I was nervous about that reception, for I didn’t know how the two crowds--Nick’s and mine--would get on with each other. And--” with her half-smile--“I daresay I wanted to make a smashing impression on Nick’s crowd. And Nick made me frantic by continuing to tell me not to be nervous. I’ll not deny that I was hateful. I loitered upstairs in the dressing-room until he came for me; and he began running down the stairs, holding on to my arm; and he said he was sorry I slipped, but that he had forgotten I had not run, and slid, down those stairs since I was born. He may not have intended it, but he was superior about it. Of course I was furious; and I said I had forgotten to powder my nose and went back to the dressing-room.” “Childish, wasn’t it?” I wanted to know. “Um-m-m. I’m not so sure. I did deeply resent his manner. Looking back on it, I believe it was his own nervousness. He was more afraid of his mother’s scolding the nearer he got to it; and he glowered, and muttered at me to know if I didn’t realize that it was unpardonably rude to be late at a reception given for one. He said those things weren’t done, amongst his mother’s friends. What would you have said to that? I said ‘I’m accustomed to doing as I see fit and letting people wait for me.’ I was sure he’d take it, and that his mother wouldn’t. And,” she cried tragically, “he laughed at me! Quite gaily laughed at me! He got over his bad temper, and stood on the stairs laughing at me. He said ‘Wait until you see them! Look here, my dear: they haven’t the remotest--’ Of course I knew what he had intended saying. He had been about to say that those frumps had never heard of me until I married him. And after meeting them--and having them try to run my life for me, with the coolest assumption of omniscience--I can believe it. Their ignorance, my dear, of what goes on in the world----! Well: I lifted my eyebrows. But he whispered to me ‘Be a good girl, won’t you? And look perfectly beautiful, for my sake?’ And I knew that he was dreading what they would say about me.”