was why, when the thing happened, it so shocked and frightened
her.

It had been one of their quiet evenings. Of late they had fallen into
the habit of sitting for long periods together without speaking. But it
had differed from other quiet evenings through the fact that
Elizabeth's silence hid a slight but well-defined feeling of injury.
Usually she sat happy with her thoughts, but tonight she was ruffled.
She had a grievance.

That afternoon the editor of the evening paper, whose angelic status
not even a bald head and an absence of wings and harp could conceal,
had definitely informed her that the man who had conducted the column
hitherto having resigned, the post of Heloise Milton, official adviser
to readers troubled with affairs of the heart, was hers; and he looked
to her to justify the daring experiment of letting a woman handle so
responsible a job. Imagine how Napoleon felt after Austerlitz, picture
Colonel Goethale contemplating the last spadeful of dirt from the
Panama Canal, try to visualize a suburban householder who sees a flower
emerging from the soil in which he has inserted a packet of guaranteed
seeds, and you will have some faint conception how Elizabeth felt as
those golden words proceeded from that editor's lips. For the moment
Ambition was sated. The years, rolling by, might perchance open out
other vistas; but for the moment she was content.

Into James Boyd's apartment she had walked, stepping on fleecy clouds
of rapture, to tell him the great news.

She told him the great news.

He said, 'Ah!'

There are many ways of saying 'Ah!' You can put joy, amazement, rapture
into it; you can also make it sound as if it were a reply to a remark
on the weather. James Boyd made it sound just like that. His hair was
rumpled, his brow contracted, and his manner absent. The impression he
gave Elizabeth was that he had barely heard her. The next moment he was
deep in a recital of the misdemeanours of the actors now rehearsing for
his four-act comedy. The star had done this, the leading woman that,
the juvenile something else. For the first time Elizabeth listened
unsympathetically.

The time came when speech failed James Boyd, and he sat back in his
chair, brooding. Elizabeth, cross and wounded, sat in hers, nursing
Joseph. And so, in a dim light, time flowed by.

Just how it happened she never knew. One moment, peace; the next chaos.
One moment stillness; the next, Joseph hurtling through the air, a