So he came in and sat down across the hearth from me, and neither of us said anything. The firelight flickered over the room, bringing out the faded hues of the old Japanese prints on the walls, gleaming in the mother-of-pearl eyes of the dragon on the screen, setting a grotesque god on a cabinet to nodding. And it threw into relief the strong profile of the man across from me, as he stared at the fire.
“I am afraid I am not very interesting,” I said at last, when he showed no sign of breaking the silence. “The—the illness of the butler and—Miss Caruthers’ arrival, have been upsetting.”
He suddenly roused with a start from a brown reverie.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I—oh, of course not! I was wondering if I—if you were offended at what I said earlier in the evening; the—Brushwood Boy, you know, and all that.”
“Offended?” I repeated, puzzled.
“You see, I have been living out of the world so long, and never seeing any women but Indian squaws”—so there were no Spanish girls!—“that I’m afraid I say what comes into my mind without circumlocution. And then—I did not know you were married.”
“No, oh, no,” I said hastily. “But, of course, the more a woman is married—I mean, you can not say too many nice things to married women. They—need them, you know.”
I had floundered miserably, with his eyes on me, and I half expected him to be shocked, or to say that married women should be satisfied with the nice things their husbands say to them. But he merely remarked apropos of nothing, or following a line of thought he had not voiced, that it was trite but true that a good many men owed their success in life to their wives.
“And a good many owe their wives to their success in life,” I retorted cynically. At which he stared at me again.
It was then that the real complexity of the situation began to develop. Some one had rung the bell and been admitted to the library and a maid came to the door of the den. When she saw us she stopped uncertainly. Even then it struck me that she looked odd, and she was not in uniform. However, I was not informed at that time about bachelor establishments, and the first thing she said, when she had asked to speak to me in the hall, knocked her and her clothes clear out of my head. Evidently she knew me.