denoted by a blue-glass
jewel. Across their bed, making it a dais of incongruous splendor, was
flung a great counterpane of embroidered linen, in design as narrative
as a battle-surging tapestry and every thread in it woven out of these
long, quiet evenings by the lamp side.

He was exceedingly proud of her cunning with a needle, so fine that its
stab through the cloth was too slight to be seen, and would lose no
occasion to show off the many evidences of her delicate workmanship that
were everywhere about the room.

"It's like being able to create a book or a piece of music, Em, to say
all that on a piece of cloth with nothing but a needle."

"It's a good thing I am able to create something, Henry," placing her
thimbled hand on his shoulder and smiling down. She was slightly the
taller.

It was remarkable how quick and how tender his intuitions could be.
An innuendo from her, faint as the brush of a wing, and he would
immediately cluck with his tongue and throw out quite a bravado of
chest.

"You're all right, Em. You suit me."

"And you suit me, Henry," stroking his hand.

This he withdrew. It was apt to smell of fish and he thought that once
or twice he had noticed her draw back from it, and, anyway, he was
exceedingly delicate about the cling of the rottenly pungent fish odor
of his workadays.

Not that he minded personally. He had long ago ceased to have any
consciousness of the vapors that poured from the bins and the incoming
catches into his little partitioned-off office. But occasionally he
noticed that in street cars noses would begin to crinkle around him,
and every once in a while, even in a crowded conveyance he would find
himself the center of a little oasis of vacant seats which he had
created around himself.

Immediately upon his arrival home, although his hands seldom touched the
fish, he would wash them in a solution of warm water and carbolic
acid, and most of the time he changed his suit before dinner, from a
salt-and-pepper to a pepper-and-salt, the only sartorial variety in
which he ever indulged.

His wife was invariably touched by this little nicety of his, and
sometimes bravely forced his hand to her cheek to prove her lack of
repugnance.

Boarding-house lore had it correctly. They were an exceedingly nice
couple, the Jetts.

One day in autumn, with the sky the color and heaviness of a Lynnhaven
oyster, Mrs. Jett sat quite unusually forward on her chair at one of
the afternoon