She could not help laughing, but it did not make her any the less nervous, or her voice any the less shaky as she began:
It was after dinner on one of those rare occasions when they dined alone together.
They were taking coffee in Mrs. Shattuck's especial corner of the drawing-room, and she had just asked her husband to smoke.
She was leaning back comfortably in a nest of cushions, in her very latest gown, with a most becoming light falling on her from the tall, yellow-shaded lamp.
He was facing her—astride his chair, in a position man has loved since creation.
He was just thinking that his wife had never looked handsomer, finer, in fact, in all her life—quite the satisfactory, all-round, desirable sort of a woman a man's wife ought to be.
She was wondering if he would ever be any less attractive to all women than he was now at forty-two—or any better able to resist his own power.
As she put her coffee cup back on the tiny table at her elbow, he leaned forward, and picked up a book which lay open on a chair near him, and carelessly glanced at it.
"Schopenhauer," and he wrinkled his brows and glanced half whimsically down the page. "I never can get used to a woman reading that stuff—and in French, at that. If you took it up to perfect your German there would be some sense in it."