r lacking in wifely devotion because
she had been out.

"Yes. There was a meeting at the Woman's Forum this afternoon," she
answered. She was unpinning her hat before the pier glass, and in it
he could see the reflection of her eyes turned upon his image with a
questioning look.

"The ladies seem to be having a busy day of it."

He struggled not quite successfully to be facetious over the pretty,
negligible activities of his wife's sex. "What mighty theme engaged your
attention?"

"That Miss Eliot--the real estate woman, you know--" George stiffened
into an attitude of close attention--"spoke about the conditions under
which women are working in the mills in this city and in the rest of the
county--" Genevieve averted her mirrored eyes from his mirrored face.
She moved toward her dressing-table.

"Oh, she did! and is the Woman's Forum going to come to grips with
the industrial monster and bring in the millennium by the first of the
year?"

But George was painfully aware that light banter which fails to be
convincingly light is but a snarl.

Genevieve colored slightly as she studied the condition of a pair of
long white gloves which she had taken from a drawer.

"Of course the Woman's Forum is only for discussion," she said mildly.
"It doesn't initiate any action." Then she raised her eyes to his face
and George felt his universe reel about him.

For his wife's beautiful eyes were turned upon him, not in limpid
adoration, not in perfect acceptance of all his views, unheard,
unweighed; but with a question in their blue depths.

The horrid clairvoyance which harassment and self-distrust had given
him that afternoon enabled him, he thought, to translate that look.
The Eliot woman, in her speech before the Woman's Forum, had doubtless
placed the responsibility for the continuation of those factory
conditions upon the district attorney's office, had doubtless repeated
those damn fool, impractical questions which the suffragists were
displaying in McMonigal's windows.

And Genevieve was asking them in her mind! Genevieve was questioning
him, his motives, his standards, his intentions! Genevieve was not
intellectually a charming mechanical doll who would always answer "yes"
and "no" as he pressed the strings, and maintain a comfortable vacuity
when he was not at hand to perform the kindly act. Genevieve was
thinking on her own account. What, he wondered angrily, as he
dressed--for he could not bring himself to as