It was almost too serious for jests, and Lita said in a voice that just didn't tremble that she took the 4:08. Life is not often just right, not only in the present, but promising in forty-eight hours to be just as good or better. Lita spent two wonderful hours. First they talked about Aurelia--her courage, her loneliness, her parents, divorce in general--and then Lita found herself telling him the whole story of her own position in regard to her parents. Even to Aurelia, with whom she talked so frankly, she had never told the whole story--her own deep emotional reactions. She found to her surprise that it was easier to tell a story of an intimate nature to this stranger of an opposite sex than to her lifelong friend. He understood so perfectly. He did not blame them; if he had she would have felt called on to defend them; and he did not blame her; if he had she would have been forced into attacking them. He just listened, and seemed to think it was a normal and deeply interesting bit of life. He interrupted her once to say, "But you must remember that they are people as well as parents." It seemed to her an inspired utterance. She did not always remember that. She offered the excuse: "Yes, but I don't mind their being divorced. Only why do they hate each other so?" "How do you know they hate each other?" Lita thought this was a queer thing to say after all that she had told him--almost stupid. She explained again: They were always abusing each other; nothing the other did was right; neither could bear her to speak well of-- "They sound to me," said Dacer, "as if they were still fond of each other." Then, as Lita just stared at him, he went on: "Didn't you know that? The only people it's any fun to quarrel with are the people you love." "Oh, no." "Well, I'm glad you haven't found it out as yet, but it's true." "I never quarrel," said Lita. "You will some day. I expect to quarrel a lot with my wife." "I shall never quarrel with my husband." "No? Well, perhaps I'm wrong then." She was angry at herself for glancing up so quickly to see what he could possibly mean by that except--he was looking at her gravely. "Look here!" he said. "That's a mistake about Italy. You don't want to go to Italy next summer." She was aware of two contradictory impressions during the entire journey--one that this was the most extraordinary and dramatic event, and that no heroine in fiction had ever such an adventure; and the other that it was absolutely inevitable, and that she was now for the first time a normal member of the human species. Nothing in the whole experience thrilled her more than the calm, almost martial way in which he said as they were getting off the train at the Grand Central, "Now we'll get a taxi." She was obliged to explain to him that they couldn't; her mother would be at the gate waiting for her--she always was. Only this time she wasn't.