I had no reply to this. I did not know. Through a perturbation set up by his question, I heard him explaining that we appeared unable to stay away from each other except when we were deep in slumber; we were, he said, banded against everyone besides ourselves. Architects did not feel this overpowering urge to herd together every evening. On the golf links, he had observed that lawyers mingled agreeably with men who were neither lawyers nor judges, doctors with men who might be potential patients but who had not yet fallen into their professional hands. His friend Anthony Bloodgood, to take an example, could bear it if the stock market were not mentioned during his hours of relaxation. But always amongst us, he averred, there spatted back and forth our technical discussions. “Do you never weary of it?” he wanted to know. I murmured in extenuation that we did not always listen to what the other said; we waited our own turn to say something. In this way, I explained, we snatched a bit of rest here and there. “Your private lives, in short,” he on his part expounded, “are lived in the midst of turmoil?” He was, I suspected, thinking of something that his words but overlaid. I was proud of myself that I smiled good-naturedly. “You are in league with Mattie, then?” As he was frankly puzzled, I explained. Having finally found time for listening to whatever was preying on Mattie’s mind, that competent maid had almost sobbed to me: “Miss Eva’s got some friends what’s got looks like pizen. Yes ma’am, like pizen. But do dat stop Miss Eva from listenin’ to ’em? No ma’am, it don’t. Lordy, Miss Dinah, she ain’t got nothin’ but fancy sense. But she got a good heart. She’s jes’ like a little chile with a good heart, an’ belief.” He responded to this eagerly. “She has a good heart! The things she does--Mattie knows about them; Mattie can tell you----” He almost stammered in his desire to put his wife forward in a light that he thought new to me.