Dr. Anna looked at the pure cold profile, the wide cool grey eyes, and laughed. "He did have courage, poor devil! It must have been--no, there was no moonlight. Must have been the suggestion of that old Lovers' Lane, Elsinore Avenue. But if you wanted men to make love to you, my dear, you could have them by the dozen. Nothing easier--for pretty women of any age who want to be made love to. As for Rush--" She hesitated, then added generously, "he has a future, I think, and could take you somewhere else." "I should be like a fish out of water anywhere but in Elsinore. I have no delusions. Forty-two is not young--that is to say, it is long past the adaptable age, unless a woman has spent her life on the move and filling it with variety. I love Elsinore as a cat loves its hearth-rug. And I can get to New York in an hour. I think this would be the ideal life with about two thousand dollars more a year, and--and--" "Dave Balfame somewhere else! Pity Sam Cummack didn't turn him into a travelling salesman instead of planting him here." "He's never been interested in anything in his life but politics. But I don't really bother about him," she added lightly. "I have him well trained. After all, he never comes home to lunch, he interferes with me very little, he goes to the Elks every night soon after dinner, and he falls asleep the minute he gets into bed. Why, he doesn't even snore. And he carries his liquor pretty well. I guess you can't expect much more than that after twenty-two years of matrimony. I notice that if it isn't one thing it's another." "Good Lord! Well, I wish he'd break his neck." "Oh, Anna!" "Well, of course I didn't mean it. But I see so many good people die--so many lovely children--I'm sort of callous, I guess. I make no bones of wishing that he'd died of typhoid fever last week, instead of poor Joe Morton, who had a wife and two children to support, and was the salt of the earth--" "You might give Dave a few germs in a capsule!" Mrs. Balfame interrupted in her lightest tones, although she turned her face away. "Or that untraceable poison you once showed me. A bottle of that would finish him!" "A drop and none the wiser." Dr. Anna's contralto tones were gloomy and morose. "Unfortunately, I am not scientific enough for cold-blooded murder. I'm a silly old Utopian who wishes that a plague would come and sweep all the undesirables from the earth and let us start fair with our modern wisdom. Then I suppose we'd bore one another to death until original sin cropped out again. Better speed up, I guess. I've a full evening ahead of me." CHAPTER IV