Properly, he ignored my question. “She said that she was so crowded in her life--she had so little room in which to work. This was, simply, making excuses--laying the groundwork of her plan, whatever it may be. She said that a man and his claims--his mere presence in the house--held her down, cramping her spirit, injuring her work. If she had wings, she said--and she acknowledged that possibly she hadn’t; she said she hadn’t had a fair chance to see if they would grow--the claims of a man would clip them. This was ingratitude, Dinah. I make myself scarce around the house when she’s working. And besides, all day I’m at my office. I called her attention to this.” “Shouting?” I enquired, to ease a tension. His laugh was a bark. “I did. She came back at me, however: she said that I was in the air around her. That she knew I was in existence. That this crowded her--that I was in existence!” His face was clouded with masculine, perplexed resentment. “I said, to this, that I’d be damned if I believed she knew what she wanted out of life. And I asked her, point-blank, what she did want.” He cast at me a shame-faced smile. “You know how she gets you when you’re angriest? With just one little childlike word? She said ‘Wings!’ I assure you, I melted!” In deciding to catechize him, I had not bargained for so much. I was overwhelmed by these riches of confidence. His outburst, almost popping from his lips as if a cork had been drawn from a soda bottle, and incited by the titillation of the clicking typewriters across the partition, came more easily to a comparative stranger. I only hoped that he would not fly to the other extreme by the next occasion when we should be thrown together. He had so shaken himself by his recital of this scene with his wife that he now swept into a confession as embarrassing for me as it would be for him when he came to think it over. It was a queer state of affairs: both of them working, and each doubting the power of accomplishment of the other. He had said to her: “Suppose I came at you with a remark on the order of these you’ve been throwing at my head?” And she had replied carelessly “Oh, but, you know, you’d never feel this way because you aren’t made of the same clay.” This was what she thought of him; this was how she rated his ability. Nothing that he had accomplished had changed her basic distrust, nothing he might in future achieve would make an iota of difference. In this she was like a man, who can love a woman and at the same time believe her to be a simpleton. It behooved him to look into his mind, to weigh his imagination, in order to settle the question of her estimate before the power of her cool conviction undermined his self-confidence. Suppose he were wrong about himself? But, by acknowledging the chance of this, he did not in the least admit Eva’s conception of their relative standing: a man’s mind would be, necessarily, a better mind than a woman’s. If he had been able to think