It required an effort of memory for me to put myself into sympathy with her present craving. I hadn't thought of a cocktail since I had awakened. It was only once in a very great while that I indulged in an eye-opener. But I had been out very late Tuesday night--in fact, it had been this morning before I had reached home from the club--and I was not, upon reflection, altogether astonished at the wish that my poor wife had expressed with such awkward coyness. But to grant her request demanded heroic action, and I hesitated before taking what might prove to be an irrevocable step. If I left the bed under existing conditions, a temporary psychical maladjustment might become permanent. Then, again, I realized that my little feet felt repelled by the chill that would come to them if exposed to a cold draught that blew through a window open in my--or, rather, Caroline's--dressing-room.
"Go into the bathroom and take a cold plunge," I suggested to Caroline, to gain time. "It's more bracing than a cocktail."
"You ought to know, Reginald," she remarked, in my most playful voice.
Her ill-timed jocosity struck me as ghastly.
"Caroline, dear," I began, "we must beware of recriminations. 'It is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us,'" I quoted, mournfully. "If we should fall out, you and I----"
"If we only could!" sighed Caroline.
"Could what?" I cried, in shrill falsetto.
"Fall out, Reginald," she answered, grimly. "Can't you think of something else to try? Really, it's too absurd! What is the matter with us, Reggie? Are we dreaming?"
I listened, intently. The servants were astir down-stairs, and through the windows came the clatter of early vehicles and the thin voice of a newsboy crying at eight o'clock the ten o'clock "extra" of a yellow journal. There was nothing in our environment to suggest the supernatural or to explain a mystery that deepened as the moments passed. The external world was unchanged, and--startling thought!--Caroline and I must confront it presently under conditions that were, so far as I knew, unprecedented in the history of the race.
"That's no dream!" I exclaimed, terror-stricken. My wife's maid had rapped, as usual at the outer door of our apartments. "Good God, Caroline, what shall we do?"