"Oh, none whatever," Louie said hurriedly. "I don't mean that at all. But I _do_ mean she'd thoroughly enjoy seeing you made uncomfortable--got at--scored off--get her own back--you know what I mean." "That's noth----" I began absently, but checked myself. "That's nothing," I had been on the point of saying, but there were no nothings for us. Louie's vigils must be as unremitting as my own. Suddenly I found myself without the heart to ask her in detail what these were. We now had the tea-room to ourselves; the bevy of models had scurried off to the party-room, and two of them appeared to be playing an elementary duet on the piano, with wrong notes loudly and laboriously corrected, amid laughter and general high spirits. Again the contrast was cruel. _They_ hadn't to look before, behind and about them for the dread of a ruinous inadvertence.... You will find it difficult to reconcile with remorse, by the way, that, stealing another glance at Louie's drawn and anxious face, I cursed a heedless young cub who had gone to his account nearly six years before. "Anyway," she said, after a long silence, "I'll see to that as far as I can. Plan as we like, we've got to take some risks. Don't look at me like that. It isn't more than I can bear. There's joy in it too. The only thing I don't quite understand is why _I_ should want to throw that joy away by--by giving you the advice I did." "The advice you did?" "To tell your wife." "But----" It broke agitatedly from me. Again the tourmalines seemed to move. "The risk; just so; don't think I don't see it. Oh, I see it--far more plainly than you do! Haven't you thought that perhaps it's that that----" She stopped abruptly, ending in a little twanging murmur. And I had at last become conscious of something that hitherto I had only half consciously noticed--namely, that she spoke of Evie repeatedly as "your wife." Obstinately she refused to use her name. I think that I felt even then our approach to what I have called the shallows of her femininity. Can you wonder at it? Is it so very surprising that, with the tremors of those shut transmitters of her eyes, the whole fantastic and exhausting fabric of my interpretation of her feeling for myself tottered? He has to be a greater painter than Billy Izzard whose fiction can fill the life of a woman already past thirty, whom you have so heaped with cares that her face takes on age as you look at it! Her voice shook as she strove to hide all this from me. "But you see the disadvantage you have me at," she said. "_You_ know what you really want, though you haven't put it quite plainly yet; but even if I were to try it you wouldn't let me say what _I_ mean." "Oh, say it, say it: we're in the mess, and it's no good keeping things back." "No, no--you've no right to expect that of me. I'll do everything else, but I'm only a mortal woman, with limbs and hungers, after all." "You're a very wondrous one."