“Since you ask, Julie love, I am obliged to confess that you divine my idea precisely.”
“Sophie, you’re horrid!” retorted Mrs. Hopp. “Men could go if they wanted to, but they’re too busy—and too many other things. Don’t you sometimes think, Sophie, that men are a little lacking in some things? That they are rather—coarse?” But a light in her companion’s eye warned her back to relevancy. “Besides, he’s married.”
“All the worse!” briskly commented Mrs. Derwall, whose sex enabled her to follow the train of Mrs. Hopp’s thought. “And I can be pretty sure that you’ve never seen his wife.”
“It’s perfectly true that I haven’t,” proclaimed Mrs. Hopp, unabashed. “But it’s a case of ‘unknown wives of famous men’—don’t you know? She’s probably nice enough, only the quiet sort you don’t get acquainted with easily. And perhaps”—Mrs. Hopp took on an air of high misericord—“not very congenial. You’d think that if she really cared for what her husband says she’d be more in evidence at his lectures.”
Mrs. Derwall let herself go the length of a laugh.
“As if she didn’t know them by heart! I guess she’s sorry for the day she first let herself listen to them. She probably taught Lurch——”
“Murch, Sophie.”
“Murch, then, what an agreeable sensation it was to have ladies hang on his lips; and when she got tired of listening he tried it on the rest of you. Besides, if she were there it would spoil the whole show.”
“Sophie, you’re just as nasty as you can be!” cried Mrs. Hopp. “He needs the money. I know he does. He looks so ill, too—so pale and thin. It makes your heart ache to see him. And when he reads ‘James Lee’s Wife’——”
Words failed her. As for Mrs. Derwall, she gave vent to a perceptible sniff.