Was this the loyalty he had sworn to her, when she picked him out of the gutter of obscurity and married him? Had she not, all along, suspected that he was plotting an affair with this girl? No doubt the girl had been setting her cap at him, but was that a legitimate excuse for inconstancy? At his age, he ought to be beyond a desire to sow wild oats. Didn’t he know that a mature man sowing his wild oats presented as idiotic a spectacle as if he were sucking his thumb? She didn’t know or care what _his_ family would think, but was he proposing to besmirch the unstained record of _her_ family with a divorce scandal? And so on— Janet listened in icy humiliation whilst the storm broke over and around her. She expected every moment to be caught up in it, whirled into its vortex, and destroyed. What actually happened was that Mr. Grey played a ghastly imitation of his masterful hero in "The Klondike Mail," until his lady, infuriated by even this shadow of defiance, reached a degree of tension that would have burst a twelve-inch gun. Death and destruction were almost afoot when she spied the typewritten papers which Janet had just returned. She pounced upon these papers and violently projected them to a point within three inches of her spouse’s nose, after which she regaled him with a description of the flaws in the typewriting and the deficiencies in the typist. This description was pithy, elaborate, exhaustive, but it was not exactly verified. Followed an effective oratorical pause. And then Mrs. Grey begged to be informed whether the quality of the work was not ample evidence that the worker came for no good and sufficient business reasons. No one venturing to reply, she hurled the manuscripts at the head of Mr. Grey’s rapidly retreating form and, as her aim was marred by a trifling miscalculation, she picked up another document and took a shy at Janet. While Janet was warding off this missile, the playwright made good his escape. "Really, Mrs. Grey," said Janet, standing her ground boldly as her indignation got the better of her fright, "you are behaving worse than a fishwife." Mrs. Grey sobered down with incredible suddenness. "My poor girl," she said, solicitously, "did I hit you?" "You came within an ace of knocking out one of my eyes!" "Just so. Within an ace. That was my intention, precisely. I aimed for effect, not for damage. I assure you I’m a first-rate shot." Mrs. Grey had now composed her feelings and her dress, both of which had been considerably ruffled. "A husband is hard to get nowadays," she went on, smiling, "but he is even harder to keep. When a charming girl makes this comparative difficulty a superlative one, she does a wife grave wrong. Still, under the circumstances, I forgive you." "You mustn’t presume too much on my wickedness," said Janet, smiling at this strange turn of affairs. "I’m disgracefully inexperienced."