Mac turned in despair to his wife.

"Did you ever see such a chap in your life? You'd think, to hear him, he'd never heard of appropriations for publicity campaigns, or advertising schemes. Things do themselves in his world--you don't even have to drop a nickel in the slot!"

Bill regarded me with attention.

"He's got something up his sleeve," she remarked, sagely. "If he keeps us guessing we'll send him to New York to have his Christmas dinner by himself."

"I'm not going to keep you guessing," I said, "but I haven't been able to get a word in edgeway yet. Leaving the great cosmic question of publicity, of which I get rather tired at times in spite of its lucrative side, I want to call your attention to something--I was going to say under our noses--something close by."

They gazed at me in doubt and then looked at each other. Mac made allusion, tapping his forehead the while, to the strain of Christmas work. And they shook their heads.

"Well, go on," humoured Bill, rising to bring in the coffee.

"What's this wonderful something you've discovered?"

"I have reason to believe," I said, without looking up from my plate, "that Mrs. Carville had a visitor last night."

"No!" they e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in unison. I nodded.

"You miss something by sleeping at the back. Just as I was comfortably in bed, the room was flooded with the blinding white glare that indicates a pa.s.sing automobile. This particular white glare, however, did not vanish as usual. It remained. My attention, which was only partially aware of it, gradually became undivided and led me to sit up and look out. A large car stood opposite the house next door, the two headlights showing up the roadway and sidewalk all down the street. Even as I watched, a tall figure came down from the house and the lights went out. I could see the car plainly as a dark ma.s.s under the trees. And that, for the best part of half an hour, was all I did see. I lay down again and tried to focus my mind on this problem. I don't mind admitting I am still without a solution. I lay there thinking all sorts until the white glare suddenly illuminated the room again. I looked out. The car moved, turned slowly round, and sped away down Pine Street."

They sat and looked at me.

"I know I ought to have told you before," I said, "but the fact is I was so puzzled this morning when I woke and remembered the incident, that I didn't know what to do. It seems silly, if you look at it in the cold light of day, to draw any conclusions from such a trivial thing. I mean, if we had known nothing about them...."

"You think he's visiting her?" said Bill gravely.

"I didn't say so," I answered, "but the notion was in my mind, certainly. If so, why should he not? If Mac had a brother, and he came to New York he would not hesitate to come and see you."

"Not in the middle of the night," she objected.

"No, unless he was pressed for time, and had, shall we say, more urgent claims on his attention."

"Perhaps he came to visit his brother, not knowing he was away just now."

"I thought of that too. Where is he supposed to be just now?"

"Lord? Jimmy said he was up-state visiting Gottschalk, the millionaire who is backing the Aerial Mail Company."

n.o.body spoke for a minute or two. At length my friend rose and pushed his chair up against the table.

"Ah, well," he said, looking for his pipe, "we can't sit here chewing the rag all day."

I was sitting at my desk, biting my pen and staring absently at the whitey-brown vista of the garden with the cold blue ridge of the Orange Mountains showing through the delicate tracery of the wind-swept trees, when I heard Bill moving about the room behind me.

"You're not working," she observed perfunctorily. I nodded a.s.sent. I often wonder, to tell the truth, when I _do_ work. Even when no one is by to tell me of it, I seem to spend most of my time in idleness.

"I was thinking," I said. Perhaps I was. She came up to my chair and looked out too.

"About--you know--last night?" she asked.

"Yes, I was thinking you, being a woman, would know better than I whether there is a storm brewing."

She was silent, merely looking out at the wintry landscape.

"I feel," I went on, "that being a rather dried-up old bachelor puts me at a disadvantage. What can I know of such a situation as we imagine? I, who jog along from day to day, a journeyman scribbler! What knowledge or experience have I of the heights and depths of pa.s.sion? What can Peeping Tom know about it?"

"Don't!" she said. "We're all Peeping Toms, as far as that goes. I'm sure," she went on, "it's very difficult to guess what's in the mind of a woman like her. She's very handsome, you know. She's one of those women who are rather puny and pathetic in their 'teens, with appealing eyes, but who grow big and healthy later. Marriage does wonders for them."

"If the marriage is happy," I remarked casually. The silence that followed was so long that I twisted round in my chair. There was an odd expression on my friend's face, a commingling of wisdom, pity and reminiscence.

"What have I said?" I asked.

"No marriage is happy," she said gravely.

"Yes!" I responded.

"Not in the sense you understand the term. That's what we mean when we say you don't know anything about it. Marriage suits some men and women more than others, but that isn't to say the people it suits are any the happier. In fact, it's often the other way. They're frightfully unhappy at times. Very few married women haven't been on the point of--of making a dash for freedom at some time or other. Women you wouldn't accuse of a single rebellious thought all their born days. You'd say they were crazy. Perhaps so, at the time. They get all on edge. Weak, weedy women are different. They haven't the same call for freedom, somehow."

"What do you mean by this dash for freedom business?" I asked. Bill looked at me solemnly.

"Marriage is a ring-fence round a pretty small patch, as a rule," she observed. "A woman goes into it gladly. She feels young and weak and ignorant, and when she's married she feels _safe_. But when she grows up to her full stature of mind and body, and she's no longer weak and ignorant, it's different. It's no longer safety first with her."

"But love ..." I began. She stopped me.

"Oh, love's got nothing at all to do with it, you sentimental old thing.

How old was Juliet--fourteen, wasn't she?" she asked suddenly, staring out of the window. I nodded.

"Well, there you are!" She has many of her husband's expressions. "At thirty-two, say, she would have been a fine, big, handsome woman, knowing the world and alive all round. The chances are _she_ would have had a storm, as you call it."

"If she'd married Romeo?" I asked.

"'T wouldn't matter who she'd married," she replied, rubbing her nose.

"You're thinking of love again, I'll be bound. I'm not talking about love, my good man, I'm talking about life."

"Then you make no allowance for sentiment," I said.

"Oh don't I! I make any amount of allowance for sentiment. It's just sentiment such women as we are talking about have to watch. That's what you mean by love, I suppose. It is always prowling round the house, trying to get in. As a rule, there's no chance, for married women are too busy to be eternally thinking about love, though to read novels you'd think they were."

"A married woman, according to you, is a highly complex organism," I observed smiling.

"A married woman, according to me, is precisely what her husband has made her," she retorted, and adding, "Think that over while you get on with your work," she left the room.

But I continued to stare out of the window. Somehow I was stirred. There seemed to me something ominous in my own preoccupation with these affairs, affairs in which I could not, even had I the right, to meddle.

My friend's laconic exposition only deepened the dramatic quality of the situation. For an author I had been singularly luckless in meeting drama in my life. I had often had my artistic cupidity excited by Mr.

Carville, by the way he was continually having stimulating adventures of the soul. And what stirred me now was a vision of that sober, drab-grey little man, going about his business on the great waters, with this portentous cataclysm hanging over his destiny. And yet, according to my friend, these perilous things were constantly on the brink in most men's lives. The smug, complacent commuting folk we knew all had these moments of almost unendurable stress, yet they gave no sign. I had a sudden sense of futility. As Mr. Carville had said on one occasion, we grope.

We stumble against each other in the dark, we hear a whisper or two, or a cry, and the rest is silence. I understood, I thought, why so many writers avoid life, and content themselves with gay puppets in a puppet world. Life was too difficult, too dangerous, for play, and they can only play.