Eva said that Mrs. Van Suydam was an adept at the oblique rebuke. She had an eye like a naked blade that cut through any defense and withdrew itself into the scabbard of an old lady’s control. She wore a black velvet creation by Worth, made--so Eva afterwards found out--by the same design when its predecessor had served its day; and to this severely plain frock her maid had added snippets of old lace. Eva began to enjoy it. The smell of dying flowers was through the house; and, bathed in this sad aroma, Eva’s friends looked artificially bleached, dissipatedly fagged, while Mrs. Van Suydam’s old cronies were the dried rose leaves in the ginger jars. Charles Glidden had hung around the elderly lady, watching her like a cat at a mouse-hole; Eva saw in his eye that he meant to use her in a book. The orchestra, having eaten supper, had begun that tentative picking at strings which, in Mrs. Van Suydam’s girlhood, had indicated the resumption of the romance of posturing before respectful young men who wished to invite to the dance. Mrs. Van Suydam’s smile at Glidden was almost coquettish. The richness of her memories had, while attenuating this smile, at the same time warmed it. Fascinated, Eva drew nearer. But Spencer Mapes, with his silent pressure of attention, went with her; he talked into her ear upon impersonal subjects, and yet she knew that what he said was aimed at her marriage. “Take Hamlet, as an example of the behaviour of a man who comes at the end of a played-out old family. Hamlet--” expounded Mapes. “Bother Hamlet!” Eva had exclaimed impatiently. “--Knew that he should have been man enough to kill--and what did he do? He used foul language to the women in the case. If he had acted on his impulse, and killed----” She surveyed him with a passing contempt. “Would you kill? I doubt if you’d even use bad language.” He said: “The mind is my weapon.” I broke in with “What is Spence driving at?” She sighed. “Oh, dear me! Nick is eternally harping on that same thing! And he’s driving at nothing.” She reminded me that she was endeavouring to lay before me the case of Nicholas’ jealousy of her reputation. “It must be because he is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned. It sticks in his craw, one might say, that his wife works along a line quite independent of him,” I explained it.