"You've enjoyed the day, haven't you?" I asked, my temper overcoming my prudence. "Well, I haven't. I've been driven nearly crazy by a lot of fool women, while you've had the time of your life."
"I don't follow you," remarked my wife, severely.
"That's just it," I cried, angrily. "You lead me, and I'm forced to follow you. I tell you frankly that I've grown suspicious. You've been studying Oriental mysticism. You've been to lectures and séances, and, for all I know, you may be a favorite pupil of this chocolate-drop, Yamama."
My wife drew herself up to my full height, and gazed down at me, freezingly.
"You mean to imply, Mrs. Stevens," she remarked, with studied coldness, "that I was deliberately responsible for what happened this morning, or last night?"
"Don't dare to call me Mrs. Stevens, Caroline," I whispered, shaking with futile rage. "If I have suspected you, have I not had sufficient circumstantial evidence? Mrs. Taunton tells me that this rascally fakir Yamama turns people into pigs, frogs, any old thing. And you've allowed Edgerton to bring him here to-night! I don't believe that you have the slightest desire to--ah--change back again."
My wife laughed aloud in my most disagreeable manner.
"Here's to you, good as you are, and here's to me, bad as I am!" she cried, with most untimely geniality, and, without more ado, threw open the door to our apartments. In the center of the room stood Suzanne, pale but self-contained, awaiting my advent. For a moment, a mad project tempted me. If I rushed downstairs and had a fit in the lower hall, I might escape many of the horrors that the evening threatened to bring with it. But if I took this heroic course a doctor would be called in. On the whole, I preferred Suzanne to a physician.
I realize, clearly enough, that I lack the ability to keep or reject data with the unerring judgment of the professional story-teller. I should like to give to my testimony a somewhat artistic structure, but I am hampered in this inclination by the necessity of following the actual sequence of events. Being neither a novelist nor a scientist, I am in danger of making an amorphous presentment of facts that shall fail either to convince the psychologist or entertain the idle reader of an empty tale. On the whole, I am prone to make sacrifices in behalf of the latter. My natural inclination is toward Art rather than toward Science, and for this reason I shall remain silent regarding the petty episodes of the hour that followed my talk with Caroline. As it is, my narrative is overweighted with what may be called details of the toilet.
At half-after six my wife and I entered our drawing-room under a flag of truce. The annoyances that had hampered Caroline's unaided efforts to don my evening clothes had had a beneficial effect upon her exultant, overbearing tendencies. She was subdued in manner to the verge of gloom.