I wondered: did he love her, except for her beauty? Because if he loved her for nothing more he would not hold her. As if in reply to my silent question, he said: “Even her imperfections are lovable.” But there was, in his fond tone, in his defiant eyes, a perplexity that he as yet denied. He was trying to change the foundations of his home, to make use of a term of his profession; but when a building is erected on the wrong plan there are two things only to be done: it can be put up with, or it can be razed. “After she went away for the first summer of our married life,” he continued his apology for Eva, “she wrote me that at first she couldn’t bear to look at her typewriter because it had come between us, you might say.” But Nicholas Van Suydam was not fatuous: instantly he began to laugh. “She said that the little white keys were teeth to devour her--little masculine teeth biting her heart. I say, Dinah! What I said to her was ‘Why masculine? Feminine teeth can bite.’ And, speaking of the summer--have you any idea of what she is planning to do?” “None. But surely she would tell you?” He said that she had begged him to guard her, during the remaining weeks of spring, from the intrusion of the world. “Lock me up, if I suggest going out?” she had requested. “Don’t permit me to go to parties?” He had had what he called one of his ardent fits; he had said to her: “There’s nothing I’d like better. I’d like to think of you, all day, as safely at home waiting for my return. There’s happiness for a man--to know that the woman he loves is watching out the window for his return at night--waiting for him, beautiful and sweet, at the end of his day in a man’s rough world. Oh, Eva----!” I do not mean to say that, when telling these scattered incidents of his life with Eva, he at once launched into the extended and shameless dissertations which I time and again quote. Rather, he told his story by his halts, his uneasy frowns, his jerky flaps of his hand which were in some strange way appealing; had he not been of my own generation, there were times when I should have felt maternal towards him. But I have not Eva’s camera-like memory for conversations, and I have had to put into words those things that partly I read from his disquietude. He went floundering along. “She says things, sometimes--at home---- You see, if it weren’t for these things she says and then, evidently, tries to retract, I’d be so much less crazy about her. Can you see how that could be? She said, the other day, that something is happening to her, in her mind, so that at present she doesn’t know much about herself.” “She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.