She said angrily: “I shall lift him!” She was devastating. “You mean, you will jerk him up?” “Anyone would think,” she advanced plaintively, “that you were in love with him.” “I scarcely know him,” I said shortly. But my sympathy was shifting towards him. As he was trying to make up his mind to let his work stay in a background made so much the richer for her work, so she had decided to put the force of her will behind and push him up. This much was plain. And nothing could well be more disastrous. She said: “He laughed!” I said: “Why shouldn’t he laugh?” It was impossible for them to bolster each other’s courage. And besides, Eva had never needed an outside influence to bolster her courage; her belief in herself would always hold her up. I asked: “What had you said, to make him laugh?” “I told him that I was going to help him.” “No wonder he laughed,” I replied. Eva said sadly: “He used to seem so proud, and so completely happy. His very arm felt happy, when he put it around me as we showed the house to his mother. He had forgotten, Dinah,” she said, with her sudden understanding, “that he had chosen between his mother and me.” I thought: “Poor man!” What had the choice been, after all, but the desire of a man for happiness at any cost? And--again after all--what is it to love a woman, except in one way or another to shed your life’s blood at her feet? I said: “Oh--let’s drop it, Eva; shall we? Why should we quarrel over it?” It was dark, in the street outside. I had forgotten to stop to speak to Mattie. PART THREE [Illustration] I “Darling, are you quite sure you’re comfortable?” asked Eva over the telephone. “You mean, because I don’t like a long-winded talk over the telephone?” I demanded. “Something of the sort,” she admitted. “Well, then, now that I know you, too, are in a comfortable chair--I do think our expeditions from one party to another on New Year’s Eve were so productive of what you might call evil consequences that I must talk with you. And you are in one of your crotchety moods and won’t come down here. If you would be sensible and draw up a comfortable chair--or have you?” I acknowledged that I was in a splendid chair. “What did you mean about evil consequences resulting from the New Year’s Eve parties?” She was prompt. “You wanted to look at all sides of the prism; so you should wish to talk Nick over, now you’ve been out with the two of us in conjunction. By the way, Nick has changed his opinion of you.”