“Blonde, but not so vague as you’d think. At least, I don’t think she’d be vague if you gave her anything to do. She had to be vague to-night, of course. But didn’t you see her deliberately subduing herself to the part--holding herself in, so as not to be too pretty, too angry, too subtle, too much in love? She did everything vaguely, I imagine, so as not to hog the stage. But give her a chance, and she’d play up. I was always expecting, you know, that she _would_ hog the stage. She could have done it.... It quite got me going.” “Did you think her better than Maude Lansing?” It was something new, at least, to have him notice a woman so closely. Chalmers tasted his _pâté_ and half-nodded approvingly at it. “Oh, I don’t know anything about that. She is the only woman I have ever seen who looked like the girl I married.” I set down my glass quickly. I had drunk most of the whiskey, and therefore none of it was spilled. Chalmers married! Why--why--we knew all about him, from cradle to laboratory; or, at least, as much as men do know of other men who have no scrapes to be got out of. I looked narrowly at Chalmers. Was it possible that he had been lying low all these years, with the single intention of perpetrating eventually the supreme joke? And if he was merely a humorist of parts, why had he not assembled the crowd? Why had he selected only one of his intimates? His intimates! That was precisely what we were. Yet none of us knew that he had been married. Chalmers himself might easily not have mentioned a dead wife, but no end of people, first and last, had turned up and contributed to Chalmers’s biography, and it was odd that none of them should have mentioned his bereavement. Unless---- “No one knows I am married. No one has ever known. If I told you all about it, you’d see why. And I think I shall. That girl started it all up again.” He leaned across the table and laid his hand on my arm. His eyes glinted encouragingly at me. “Cheer up, old man! You’re not in for anything sordid. But curious--oh, very, very curious! Yes, I think, without vanity, I may say _very_ curious.... I meant what I said just now, coming out of the theatre. There aren’t but three things worth while--and I mayn’t have them. I mayn’t fight, because I might get killed before I’ve a right to; I don’t drink, for the sake of the paltry hours that might be subtracted from the sum of my years if I did; and, being married, I naturally can’t very well make love. Can I?” He turned on me with such a tone of ingenuous query that I wondered if it was a joke, after all. I tried to be cynical. “That depends....”