n
the trees and tulips in the Park, and children playing on the bits of
greensward. She had walked as far as the Zoo with the two little boys,
and, having left them with their French governess, was on her way home.
People were in the habit of dropping in between four and six, and of
late she had become somewhat dependent on their company. They kept her
from thinking. Their scraps of gossip provided her, when she talked to
her husband, with topics that steered her away from dangerous ground. He
himself had given her a hint that a certain ground was dangerous; and,
though he had done it laughingly, she had grown so sensitive as to see
in his words more perhaps than they meant. She had asked him a question
on some subject--she had forgotten what--quite remote from the mystery
of the girl in gray. Leaning across the table, with amusement on his
lips and in his eyes, he had replied:

"Don't you remember the warning?

'Where the apple reddens
Never pry,
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.'"

Inwardly she had staggered from the words as if he had struck her,
though he had no reason to suspect that. In response she merely said,
pensively: "_En sommes nous la?_"

"_En sommes nous_--where?"

"Where the apple reddens."

"Oh, but everybody's there."

"You mean all married people."

"Married and single."

"But married people _more_ than single."

"I mean that we all have our illusions, and we'd better keep them as
long as possible. When we don't--"

"We lose our Edens."

"Exactly."

"So that our Edens are no more than a sort of fool's paradise."

"Ah, no; a sort of wise man's paradise, in which he keeps all he's been
able to rescue from a wicked world."

She was afraid to go on. She might learn that she and their children and
their home and their happiness had been what _he_ had been able to
rescue from a wicked world--and that wouldn't have appeased her. Her
thoughts would have been of the wicked world from which he had escaped
more than of the paradise in which he had found shelter. She was no holy
Elisabeth, to welcome Tannhaeuser back from the Venusberg. That he should
have been in the Venusberg at all could be only a degree less torturing
to her than to know he was there still.

So she kept away from subjects that would have told her more than she
feared already, taking refuge in themes she had once considered vapid
and inane. To miss nothing, she hurried homeward on that May aft