"You two men," she said, "are trying to act as if I weren't in this; as
if I weren't just as glad as you are, and hadn't as good a right to be.
John here," this was to Jimmy, "has been gloating ever since he came
home with the paper. And you ... Did you mean me by that snippy little
thing you said about the 'I-knew-her-when' club? Oh, it was fair enough.
I'm glad you said it. Because some people we know have been downright
catty about her. But you both know perfectly well that I've stood up for
her ever since last fall when we came through New York."

John grinned. "When you saw her," he pointed out, "riding down Fifth
Avenue in a taxi, in an expensive dress...."

"It wasn't. I didn't see what she had on. I just saw that she
looked ..."

"Successful," John interrupted. But, meeting her eye, he apologized
hastily and withdrew the word. His gale of spirits had blown him a
little too far.

"I saw," said Violet with dignity, "that she looked busy and cheerful,
as if she knew, in her own mind, that she was all right. And I was glad
for her, and for us. Because you can say what you like, you can't do
anything with the people who have made mistakes and know it, and are
always on the defensive about them. When I saw she didn't feel like
that, that was enough for me. And," she fairly impaled John Williamson
now with her eye, "and you know it."

It was an able summary of her public attitude since the encounter on
Fifth Avenue, and her look at her husband relegated any private
observations of hers at variance with it into the limbo, not of things
forgotten, but of things undone, unsaid, dissolved by the sheer force of
their unfitness to exist, into the breath that begot them.

"You're quite right about it," said Jimmy. "We men are sentimentalists,
as long as things don't come home. But when they do, we're as
uncomfortable about penitents as anybody, and we give them as wide a
berth."

"You're my friend, Jimmy," she said. "There's dinner! But you won't be
allowed to eat. You'll have to begin at the beginning and tell us all
about her! Though I don't see," she went on, "how you can know very
much more than you put in the paper, if you didn't even find out where
she lived."

Jimmy, his effect produced, his long meditated vengeance completed by
the flare of color he'd seen come up in Violet's cheeks, settled down
seriously to the telling of his tale, stopping occasionally to bolt a
little food just before his plate was sn