"Do they?" Catherine shook her head. "I don't want Charles to have nothing but me in his life. Aren't women hardier? Since they've never had that--it is a sort of human sacrifice, isn't it? Men are like vines! Did you know vines wouldn't grow well, some of them, unless you sacrifice to them? Bones and flesh. 'If you have an old hen,' said the nursery man, when I asked him about our Actinidia in Maine, 'bury her close to the roots. Then the vine will shoot up.' And it did!" "You would make over the old saying about sturdy oaks, wouldn't you?" "Don't make fun of me. Perhaps I can discover something which will change the world!" She stared intently at Bill. "You--" she hesitated. "You live without that human sacrifice, Bill. You aren't an Actinidia." "And so, perhaps, I know why men wish it." Bill pushed to one side his untouched salad. "Without any question now of its fairness or justice to women like Henrietta, or you. In the first place, it is convenient, practically so; smooths down all the details of living. But especially, it drops a painted screen between man and the distressing futility of his life. A man with a family and a regular wife, old style, doesn't often have to face his own emptiness. He feels important. He hurries around at his work, and if doubt pricks a hole in that screen, the picture painted there is intricate enough to hide the hole. He has something to keep his machinery in action. If by day his little ego is deflated, there is, to change my figure, free air at home to blow him full again." "You sound as if you thought all wives were adoring and humble," said Catherine. "Some of them used to be." Bill grinned at her, and lifted his hand abruptly in a signal to the waitress. "This is supposed to be a party," he apologized, "and not a lecture by me. Tell me more about what you've been doing." Catherine's talk was fragmentary. Something--what Bill had said, or perhaps simply his being Bill with all the old associations close around him--had blown the froth away from the past two weeks; she had thought that she had become almost a different Catherine, bright, hard, full of enthusiasm and interest, absorbed in her rôle of Bureau-representative. She saw now that her inner self still stood with feet entangled in perplexity and doubt. "Bill"--she broke into her own recital--"if a man doesn't have free air at home, does he look for it somewhere else?" "He may." Bill's quick upward glance was disturbed. He knew, then, about Charles and Stella. Henrietta would have told him. "Or"--lightly--"he runs along on a flat tire." Catherine was silent, her mind skipping along with the absurd figure. Stella Partridge was, after all, too busy pumping her own ego hard to perform that task long for any man. She might flatter him, and cajole---- "Do the children write to you?" Catherine reached into the pocket of her coat.