It reacted on her husband in compelling him to work in unsettled conditions and without the leisure and continuity so essential to research. Miss Blair’s expression was that the poor man never knew where he was at. Adoring his wife, he was the more helplessly at her beck and call, for the reason that he had long ago come to the knowledge that his wife didn’t adore him. Holding her only by humoring her whims, he was just now struggling with her caprice to go back to the concert stage again. To Mildred Averill all this made little difference because she had none of the aims commonly grouped as social. Miss Blair understood that from her childhood she had been studious, serious, living quietly with her elderly parents at Mornstown, and acquiring their elderly tastes. "Its fierce the way old people hamper a girl," Lydia commented. "Just because they’re your father or mother they think they’ve a right to suck your life-blood like a leech. My mother died when I was sixteen," she added, in a tone of commendation. "Of course you’re lonely-like at times—but then you’re free." Freedom to Mildred Averill, however, was all the same as being bound. She didn’t know how to make use of liberty or give herself a good time. When her father died she stayed on with her mother at Morristown, and when the mother "punched the clock for the next life"—the figure was Miss Blair’s—she simply joined her brother and sister-in-law in New York. After she went out of mourning she was sometimes seen at a concert or the opera with Mrs. Averill. There was no more to her social life than that and an occasional dinner. "Gray-blooded, I call it," Miss Blair threw in again, "and a sinful waste of good chances. My! if I had them!" "Perhaps you can have them," I suggested, Harry Drinkwater having gone for a minute to his room. "Miss Averill told me one day that she thought of taking a house and asking you to live with her." "Me? Do you see me playing second fiddle to a girl as sure bound to be an old maid as I’m bound to be—" "An adventuress." "I’m bound to be an adventuress—if I like." "Oh, then there’s a modification to your program. The last time we talked about it you were going to do it. Now it’s only—if you like." Her lovely blue eyes shot me a look of protest. "You wouldn’t want me to do it—if I didn’t like. The worst of being an adventuress is the kind of guys you must adventure with. You don’t mean to thrust them down my throat." "Oh, I’m not urging you at all. I did happen to see you one evening at the restaurant Blitz—" She nodded. "I saw you. What were you doing there? You don’t feed at places like that." "How do you know I don’t?" "Well, I don’t know. That’s just the trouble. Sometimes I think you’re a—" "I’m a—what?" "See here! You give me the creeps. Do you know it?" "How?" "Well, you saw that guy I was with at the Blitz." "Looked like a rich fathead."