“I don’t know! Through some barrier, some limit that he has fixed for himself—I tell you I don’t know what it’s all about. That’s why I’m interested.”
“Curious, you mean.”
“Well, curious, then. And how he puts up with that hand-wringing ready-to-cry wife! Yet, he’s fawningly devoted to her! He anticipates her slightest wish,—he is worried sick if she is the least mite incommoded or disturbed,—and I know he’d lie down and let her walk on him if she even looked as if she’d care to!”
“What a lot you read into a man’s natural consideration for his wife!”
“But it’s there! I’m no fool,—I can read people,—you know that! I tell you that man is under his wife’s thumb for some reason far more potent than his love for her, or her demand for affection from him.”
“What could be the explanation?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m curious. I’m going to find out, though, and that without the Varians in the least suspecting my efforts. Wait till you see her. She’s almost eerie, she’s so emotional. Not noisy or even verbally expressive, but her face is a study in nervous excitement. She seems to grab at the heartstrings of a mere passer-by, and play on them until she tears them out!”
“Good gracious, you make her out a vampire!”
“I think she is,—not a silly vamp, that the girls joke about,—but the real thing!”