"I would have been furious, though." She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband--the apparent supplier of the opulent rings--had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction _would have been_ fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes. She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern--but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge--and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists--with the exception of Europeans visiting America.