She spoke loudly, after the manner of the New World product (_genus homo_, feminine gender). Several solid men peered at her around or over the evening papers. Two giddy girls, who had taken without thanks or scruples seats from weary men, smiled undisguisedly. Barton, standing in the aisle, holding on by the strap, his knees abraded by the jet passementerie of Miss Marvel’s velvet skirt, could not budge an inch. He must hear and, hearing, essay reply of some sort. “Ah!” albeit the safest and most commodious monosyllable in the language, cannot go on forever. “The lunch was largely attended, I suppose?” he ventured in tones studiously lowered. “By every woman in New York who is worth the notice of an intelligent being. With one distinguished exception. Mrs. Ashe’s absence was the occasion of universal regret. As a well-wisher let me warn you that you may be mobbed some day for your unconscionable cruelty to the highest order of created things; for imprisoning the eagle and stilling the song of the lark. At least fifty people asked me to-day why Agnes Welles had disappeared from the literary firmament. For one and all, I had one and the same reply. ‘She has taken the bridal veil,’ I said, tears in eyes and voice. ‘In consequence of that piece of barbarity, and for no other cause, the places that once knew her know her no more.’ One woman—I won’t divulge her name, lest you should _hate_ her—said she ‘should as soon think of chaining a thrush to the leg of a kitchen chair as of obliging that glorious young thing to resign her Heaven-appointed mission for the position of caterer, housekeeper, and seamstress.’ I shall work that _bon mot_ into my next literary letter to the Boston _Globe_. Another delightfully satirical creature advised me to take up the cause of ‘Great Women Married to Small Men,’ in my next series of papers upon ‘Unconsidered Wrongs of Our Sex.’ You see the reputation you are earning for yourself with the powers that be!” Barton Ashe was a sensible man, well educated and well bred. Under favoring circumstances, as when inspired by the society of his wife and her loving appreciation, he was quick with repartee and apt at fence even with a wordy woman. Under the present onslaught he was furious and dumb. Had a man insulted him, and less grossly, he would have knocked him down or given him his card and demanded a meeting elsewhere. This berouged and bedizened old maid compromised him in the eyes of solid men and giddy girls by entering into conversation with him at all. Each shrill word was a prickle in a pore of his mental cuticle. She advertised his wife as one of _her_ kind, arraigned him as despot and churl, menaced him with public exposure, and posed as Agnes’ champion against the oppressor on whose side was the power of law and tradition—made him ridiculous to all within the sound of her brazen tongue—and he was powerless.