"Didn’t you put it in that way yourself?" "As a feeble joke, yes. But we’ll let that pass. All I mean is that as head of the Department of Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts I knew a lot of a subject that became of great importance when we went into the war; so that, if Vio had waited—" "Vio," he grinned, "was like a bunch of other women who’d caught the fever of sacrifice, what? When all their swell lady friends in England and France were giving up their dear ones, they didn’t want not to be in the swim. Don’t think I didn’t go through it, old chap. Vio was simply crazy to give up a dear one. Before she’d got you she’d been after me. When Hilda Swain drove her two sons into being stokers in the navy, and killed one of them with the unaccustomed work, I thought Vio would go off her chump with a sense of her uselessness to a great cause. Those were days when to be Vio’s dear one meant to go in danger of your life." A hundred memories crowded in on me. "Do you think that was it? It wasn’t that—that she wanted to get rid of me?" His answer struck me oddly. "Not a bit of it, not then. Lord, no!" I repressed the questions these words called up, taking a minute to think the situation over. "At any rate, I went," I continued, with outward calm. "It was after a rather stormy scene with Vio, in which she said she thought she had married a man and not a nervous old lady." "Oh, she said worse than that to me, lots cf times, what?" "Yes, but you weren’t her husband; and you were not desperately in love with her." "Often thought Vio was like one of those queer-mixed cocktails that ’ll set chaps off their nuts who’ll take a tumbler of whisky neat and never turn a hair." "There’s something in that," I agreed; "but it makes the kind of woman whose contempt is the harder to put up with. When she began handing it out to me—well, I went. That’s all there is to be said about it. You tell me that Vio wanted to sacrifice a dear one; and she did. I was no more fit for the job I undertook than—than little Bobby would have been if he’d lived till then." "That’s another thing. Vio should have had more children, what?" "Ah, well! She didn’t want them. When little Bobby went she said she couldn’t go through it all a second time, and so— But I’m trying to tell you what happened." "Well, go on."