"You have other company there than Sol Gibbs."
"Whom do you mean?"
"There is Urith—your wife," with a sharp flash of her eye out of the corner; and insensibly she put one knee up and hugged it as did Anthony.
"Oh! Urith," he repeated, in a tone in which she discerned something like a sneer.
"Your wife."
"One cannot be talking to a wife all day," he said, peevishly, and let fall his leg and loosened his plaited fingers. She instinctively did the same.
"Can you not? Oh, indeed, that is news to me. I should have thought that you would never have lacked material for talk. Flames, darts—hymeneal altars smoking."
He looked sullenly out of the window, turning his back to her, and made no reply. She waited for a response, then said,
"If not these subjects, then chickens and goslings."
He turned his head impatiently, and said,