They did not rise from their table until nearly three o'clock. Twice she had asked: "How about the firm?" and twice he had answered irreverently: "Let them be hanged!" He looked into her eyes wondering and hoping, but in their clearness read no promise. He tried to lead their talk round to the one subject which pervaded and appalled him, but each time that he drove in his wedge of reference she shook her head at him, smiled and closed her lips, as a woman saying: "You don't talk me over in this world or the next." But when he reminded her "It was here, to this very table, that I took you, on your birthday before last," she joined him in reminiscence. "And I was miserable, envying every woman I saw, ashamed of my frock and my hands and my old shoes; ashamed of everything. I knew I couldn't compete." "You could compete with any woman in the world." He cast a deprecating look around them. "I couldn't then. There was a woman I specially envied, I remember, an actress whose name you knew. How long ago it seems." "Only a year and a half," he replied quickly, plunging into a side issue. "You admired her," she said curiously, "didn't you?" He lied: "I don't remember." "I do," she said. "I used to pray about you--that woman was in my mind when I prayed, and asked God to make you admire me for the children I'd borne, and not to let you see how old and ugly I should grow. Doesn't it seem funny?" "It's not at all funny," he said, his eyes on the tablecloth. "I'm sorry you--if you'd told me--talked to me--" "You'd have thought me more of a whining wife than ever." "Well, it's over, anyway. Won't you forget it?" "I'm just delighted to forget it. But there's a kind of joy in remembering all the same, such as a man feels in thinking of his starvation early days after he's made himself rich." "And now I'm to be starved instead?" Then she collected her muff and gloves, closed her coat, pinning the violets outside, thanked him for a nice lunch and left him. He paid the bill in a hurry and hastened after her, catching up with her upon the kerb. "Well," he said in her ear, "I shall keep on asking. What do you think?" She signalled a passing omnibus to stop and boarding it left him with a smile and wave of the hand. For a few seconds, he stood on the kerb, at grips with a feeling of humiliation and defeat, then he began to walk back to his work. He was not yet accustomed to the setting of this new act he was playing with his wife--he thought of it thus--though it was making him smart badly. As he went forward, threading his way among the hurrying after-lunch throngs, he was thinking hard. He attracted some attention from women's eyes as he swung along, oblivious, big, straight-shouldered and masculine. All the afternoon, while his mind was ostensibly upon his business, he fumed and fretted.