Mrs. Ridgie herself was waiting for them in a two-seated trap with a pair of exceedingly restless thoroughbreds. Halfway to the house they shied at an automobile and started to run. She got them under control after a struggle, and glanced round at Frothingham for approval--he looked calm and seemed unconscious that anything disturbing had happened. “Ridgie told me not to take this pair out,” she said. “But I make it a rule never to obey an order from him. In that way we get on beautifully. He loves to give orders--and I never object. I love to disobey orders--and he never objects.” The Ridgie Stauntons lived in what seemed to Frothingham little more than an exalted farmhouse, though it was regarded in that neighbourhood as a sinful flaunting of luxury, the worst of Mrs. Ridgie’s many sins of ostentation and extravagance. These were endured because she was married to a Staunton, and because she was from New York, and therefore could not be expected to know what was vulgar and what well bred. But Frothingham was more comfortable than he had been since the day before he left Lake-in-the-Wood. Mrs. Ridgie would live in free-and-easy fashion--one could smoke through all the house; there were drinks and plenty of good cigars and cigarettes available at all times; and the talk was the unpretentious gossip and slang of fast sets everywhere--intelligent people intelligently frivolous. Frothingham thought Ridgie Staunton “a harmless sort, a bit loud and noisy,” but well-meaning, and good enough except when he had his occasional brief spasmodic fits of remembering his early training, and feeling that his mode of life was all wrong. He was, in his wife’s opinion, a perfect husband, except that he hung about so much. “What do your English women do with their husbands, Lord Frothingham?” she said. “It’s a horrible nuisance, having a man--a husband--round all day long with nothing to do. I try to drive Ridgie out to work. But he’s a lazy dog. He goes a few steps and then comes slinking back. I’m opposed to a leisure class--of men.” “And you said only yesterday,” complained Ridgie, “that Englishmen make better lovers than Americans because they have leisure and the sense of leisure, while Americans are forever looking at watches and clocks.” “Did I? But that was yesterday,” retorted his wife. “Besides, I said lovers--not husbands. Give me an English lover, but a hard-working, stay-away-from-home American husband.” “Do you wonder that I watch a wife who talks like that?” said Ridgie cheerfully.