Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew away from the temple. "T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way purposely." "Francis X--?" He was not a follower of the films. Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side face." "I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four. Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" Emma knew he was pursuing the daily _schrecklichkeit_. Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest: "One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the _Times_ delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies for it, mornings." It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes. "Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him. "You take it, dear." "Oh, no! No." She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess. "By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--" "Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I shall have to consider our marriage a failure." "Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--" "I am. But there's something about having it read to you--"