car and carried her
bodily and triumphantly up the steps.

I waited for Dinkie, whose eye met mine. I did my best to show my
teeth, that he might understand how everything was eventually to be
for the best. But his face was still clouded as we climbed the steps
and passed under the yoke.

The little Jap, whose name, I have since found out, is Tokudo, bowed a
jack-knife bow and said "_Irashai_" as I passed him. And "_Irashai_" I
have also discovered, is perfectly good Japanese for "Welcome."

We had dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off
rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom,
and the children were tired, and Duncan, I'm afraid, was a bit
disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought cocktails for us, and
Duncan, seeing I wasn't drinking mine, stowed both away in his
honorable stomach. He ate heartily, I noticed, and gave scant
appearance of a man pining away with a broken heart. After dinner he
sat back and bit off the end of a cigar.

"This is my idea of living," he proclaimed as he sent a blue cloud up
toward the rather awful dome-light above the big table. "There's stir
and movement here, all day long. Something more than sunsets to look
at! You'll see--something to fill up your day! Why, night seems to
come before I even know it. And before I'm out of bed I'm brooding
over what's ahead of me for that particular date and day--Say, that
girl of ours is falling asleep in her chair there!"

So I escaped and put the children to bed. And while thus engaged I
discovered that some of Duncan's new friends were dropping in on him.
I wanted to stay up-stairs, for my head was aching a lot and my heart
just a little, but Duncan called to me from the bottom of the stairs.
So down I went, like a dutiful wife, to the room full of smoke and
talk, where two big men and one very thin woman in a baby-bear motor
coat were drinking Scotch highballs with my lord and master. They were
genial and jolly enough, but I couldn't understand their allusions and
I couldn't see the points to their jokes. And they seemed to stay an
interminable length of time. I was secretly uncomfortable, until they
went, but I became still more uncomfortable after they had gone.

For as we sat there together, in that oppressive big room, I made
rather an awful discovery. I found that my husband and I had scarcely
anything we could talk about together. So I sat there, like an
alligator in a bayou, wondering