As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of Fortune and Brooks' well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was intensely self-conscious in Stan's presence. She felt that when he wasn't looking at her clothes he was, expressly, not-looking at them, and that was worse.... But she couldn't have worn a hobble skirt and an aigrette at the "Eden."... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and Blue-Beard's-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed to him to promise.
"Poor little darlings!" Dorothy exclaimed compassionately by and by—Katie had been relating some anecdote in which Corin and Bonniebell had played a part. "I do think it's wrong to dress children ridiculously! The other day I saw a little girl—she must have been quite six or seven—and she'd knickers like a little boy, and long golden hair all down her back! What is the good of pretending that girls are boys?"
"Awful rot," Stan remarked with a mighty stretch. "I say, I'm off to bed; I shall be yawning in Miss Deedes' face if I don't. Is there any arnica in the house, Dot?... Good night——"
"Good night," said Katie; and as the door closed behind the master of the house she settled more comfortably in her chair. "Now that he's stopped not-looking at me we can have a good talk," her gesture seemed to say; "how does he expect I can get any other clothes till I've saved the money?"...
They did talk. They talked of the old days at the McGrath, and who'd married who, and who hadn't married who after all, and, in this connection, of Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, whom they had both known.... And it just showed how little glory and fame were really worth in the world. For Dorothy, who had been living in London all this time, had not heard as much as a whisper of that memorable revolt of the Wyrons against the Marriage Service, and, though she did know vaguely that Walter lectured, had not the ghost of an idea of what his lectures were about. She had been too busy minding her own petty and private and selfish affairs. Katie couldn't believe it. She thought Dorothy was joking.
"You've never heard of Walter's Lecture on 'Heads or Tails in the Trying Time,' nor his 'Address on the Chromosome'?" she gasped....
"No; do tell me. What is a Chromosome?"
"A Chromosome? Why, it's a—it's a—well, you know when you've a cell—or a nucleus—or a gland or something—but it isn't a gland—it's the—but you do astonish me, Dorothy!"
"But surely you're joking about Walter and Laura?" Dorothy exclaimed in her turn.
"Indeed I'm not! Why, I thought everybody knew!..."