“Haven’t seen him for two weeks. He has his meals sent upstairs. Says he always becomes the complete hermit toward the end. I suppose he doesn’t even shave.” Gita was smoking placidly and Elsie looked at her speculatively. “Your experiment has been a success,” she observed. “I wondered if it would——” “Of course it has been a success. We’ve even had our little tiffs. Sometimes, particularly at the table, I feel almost domestic. But when we have an evening at home he comes downstairs to call and we have one of our old wonderful talks. The more I see of all these clever men the more I admire Eustace, for he has a mental grace that seems to be a sort of left-over and successfully eluded by the rest of them. I’ve missed him terribly these last weeks.” “Too bad more husbands don’t take a leaf out of his book! In some ways your marriage is an ideal one.” “All ways.” “Well, of course all women wouldn’t think so.” “More fools they.” “Gita——” Elsie hesitated. She seldom pressed too close to this still incalculable friend, but no artistic faculty would continue to function without curiosity. Moreover, she was still more interested personally in Gita than in anyone she had ever known, save, possibly, Eustace Bylant. “Well?” Gita, who had returned at two in the morning from a party at Potts Dawes’s, was sunken deep in her chair, enjoying the sensation of complete repose. She had lost some of her color, but her pink negligée shed a soft glow over her face that would have softened it as well had it not been for her hair, which, springing away from her face and very thick at the back, gave her, Elsie thought, the appearance of an eagle about to lift its wings and take flight. And her eyes, in spite of her mild dissipations, never looked heavy, although less fierce than formerly. Gita had ceased to fear men and found many of Eustace’s friends as likable and amusing as she had anticipated. Whether a bride was sacrosanct even in a circle whose bugle-cry was scorn of tradition, or they cared for no reckoning with Bylant, or thought her too difficult game for a busy age, was a matter of indifference to her. They admired her extravagantly, but they let her alone. Once Peter Whiffle kissed her instep, but she had turned her eyes away from so much worse that she was inclined to be lenient and merely brushed him off as she would a mosquito. They discussed esoteric literature at odds with the censor for the rest of the evening. “Gita——” “Well—once more. You look as if you had something on your mind. Better get it off.” “I can’t help wondering—I witnessed a good many changes before you married . . . but this winter in New York has changed you still more——” “Developed, dear Elsie. You’re careless in the use of words, for a stylist. We don’t change, you know.”