“Yes, it wasn’t bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk to all those stupid people.”
“Stupid? What d’you mean by ‘stupid’? They got me splendidly. They were fine.”
“Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won’t have to keep up this silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too well to let you in on it very often.”
“I didn’t mind it. Fact, don’t know but what it’s a good thing to have to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you think more lucidly.”
“As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!”
“Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband is a mutt, and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you might pretend to be a little enthusiastic over the first address he’s ever made—the very first he’s ev-er tackled—when it went off so well.”
“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were terribly smart. It’s just— There’s other things I think you can do better. What shall we do to-night; have a cold snack at home or go to the cafeteria?”
Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures of inappreciation.
He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday. They sat down to what he announced as “getting back to some real reading, like physiology and a little of this fellow Arnold Bennett—nice quiet reading,” but which consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.
He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded: