e lived? There was not a person in the room who did not
know her as well as he did. Bobs knew her better. He went over to the
table, where she presided.

"You look as if you'd rather eat me, than amuse me," she remarked.

"Bobs, would you consider Jane an intellectual woman?" he inquired
abruptly.

"Intellectual? Let me see. She is the best-read woman I know. She's a
shark on modern poetry; she has a sound acquaintance with the principles
of art; she's seen all the pictures and statuary in New York, and has
ideas about them; she has looked into the labour question for women. I
might not call her intellectual, but I'd call her up-to-the-minute in
modern thought."

"Good Lord!" said Jerry.

"Oh, you don't know the first living thing about Jane. The baby knows
more about her."

"You needn't rub it in."

"She's the biggest person in this room, is Jane."

"What started you on this Jane worship, Bobs?"

"Something happened to me that knocked the very foundations out from
under my life for a while," she answered him directly. "I would have
killed myself if it had not been for Jane."

"Did she know what was the matter with you?"

"Yes, but she pretended not to know whom it was I cared for."

"She knew that, too?"

"All the time. She never forced anything on me, she just stood by, and
helped me weather it. Last summer she put the finishing touches on my
cure. I love her as I never loved any human being."

"I didn't know about this."

"Of course not. You were too busy with Althea to notice what Jane was
making of the pieces you had left of me. Sort of poetic justice, after
all."

"Good heavens, Bobs, don't!"

"Not just the place to discuss our stormy past," she laughed.

Some one demanded tea, so Jerry escaped. He felt as if he had spent the
afternoon gathering information about Jane, focussing his entire
attention upon her. He had discovered his wife to be a strange and
rather powerful personality, reacting on all the people about her,
including himself.

He did an odd thing, then. He could not have explained the impulse to
himself. But he left the party and walked upstairs into the nursery,
where Mrs. Biggs guarded his son. The baby was awake, and Jerry sat down
beside him, staring into his face, trying to penetrate through him, into
the depths of that opaque being who was his mother.

CHAPTER XXIV

Jerry's awakening to Jane, as a personality to be coped with, brought
with it a trail of perp