“I’ve only had two affairs,” she went on, regardless of his distaste. “There was Dempsi and there was Dingo.”
“Who was Dingo?” he was trapped into asking.
“His name wasn’t really Dingo, it was Mr. Theophilus Shawn. He was a married man with five children.”
“Good God!” Gordon dropped his knife and fork on the plate helplessly.
“He never kissed me,” she said. “His wife came and took him away just as I was getting to like the smell of cloves—he used to eat cloves. He said it made his hair grow. Whenever he ran short of cloves he got into his car and drove to the hotel to get some. He’d go a dozen times a day. He was staying with Auntie; she met him at a lecture on sunspots, but she didn’t know anything about his wife until she came for him. She was an awfully nice woman, and thanked me for looking after her husband. She said she hadn’t seen him sober before—she was awfully interested in him. I think wives should get to know their husbands before they’re married, don’t you?”
Mr. Selsbury sighed.
“I think you’re talking a lot of abject nonsense,” he said, “and I wish to heaven you’d get to know your husband!”
She smiled, but did not reply. She felt that he had been shocked enough for one day.
He was making as if to get up from the breakfast table when she remembered a question she wanted to ask him.
“Gordon, that man who came yesterday, the man with the Hebrew name——”