The tea had come and Madame Beattie lifted her cup in a manner elegantly calculated to display, though ingenuously, a hand loaded with rings. "Dear auntie," said Esther, widening eyes that had been potent with Alston Choate but would do slight execution among a feminine contingent, "Jeffrey wouldn't be happy with me." "Nonsense," said Aunt Patricia, herself taking the teapot and strengthening her cup. "What do you mean by happy?" "He is completely estranged," said Esther. "He is a different man from what he used to be." "Of course he's different. You're different. So am I. He can't take up things where he left them, but he's got to take them up somewhere. What's he going to do?" "I don't know," said Esther. She drank her tea nervously. It seemed to her she needed a vivifying draught. "Auntie, you don't quite understand. We are divorced in every sense." That sounded complete, and she hoped for some slight change of position on the part of the inquisitor. "Of course you went to see him while he was in prison?" auntie pursued inexorably. "No," said Esther, in a voice thrillingly sweet. "He didn't wish it." Auntie helped herself to tea. Esther made a mental note that an extra quantity must be brewed next time. "You see," said Madame Beattie, putting her cup down and settling back into her chair with an undue prominence of frontal velvet, "you have to take these things like a woman of the world. What's all this talk about feelings, and Jeff's being unhappy and happy? He's married you, and it's a good thing for you both you've got each other to turn to. This kind of sentimental talk does very well before marriage. It has its place. You'd never marry without it. But after the first you might as well take things as they come. There was my husband. I bore everything from him. Then I kicked over the traces and he bore everything from me. But when we found everybody was doing us and we should be a great deal stronger together than apart, we came together again. And he died very happily." Esther thought, in her physical aversion to auntie, that he must indeed have been happy in the only escape left open to him. "Where is Susan?" auntie inquired, after a brief interlude of coughing. It could never be known whether her coughs were real. She had little dry coughs of doubt, of derision, of good-natured tolerance; but perhaps she herself couldn't have said now whether they had their origin in any disability. "Grandma is in her room," said Esther faintly. She felt a savage distaste for facing the prospect of them together, auntie who would be sure to see grandmother, and grandmother who would not be seen. "She lies in bed." "All the time?" "Yes." "Not all the time!" "Why, yes, auntie, she lies in bed all the time." "What for? Is she crippled, or paralysed or what?" "She says she is old." "Old? Susan is seventy-six. She's a fool. Doesn't she know you don't have to give up your faculties at all unless you stop using them?"