She could not get away from the grip of her morning interview.  Try as she would, she could not shake it off.  It caught her back in the middle of her talk, made her answer at random, and held her with a terrible power.  She considered that there were a thousand other things she might have said or done, a hundred ways by which she might have appealed to Hartley, and yet her common sense told her that the less she said on the subject the better it would be, if, in the end, the Rev. Francis Heath was led into the awful pitfalls of cross-examination.  Anyone may forget and recall facts later, but to state facts that may be used as evidence is to stand handcuffed before inexorable justice, and Mrs. Wilder had left her hands free.

“Is anything the matter?” Draycott jerked out the question as he got up to leave the room.  “You seem rather silent.”

Clarice laughed, and her laugh was slightly forced.

“I went for a ride this morning, and met Mr. Hartley.  He is the most exhausting man I ever met.”

“I hope you told him so,” said Wilder shortly.  “He’s about here frequently enough, even though he does bore you.”

Something in his voice made her eyes focus him very clearly and distinctly.

“I have a very good mind to tell him,” she said easily, “but he is blessed with a skin that would turn the edge of any ordinary hatchet; he would think I was merely being ‘funny.’”

“It’s an odd fact,” said Draycott with a sneer in his eyes, “that however much a woman complains of a man’s stupidity, she will let him hang about her, and make a grievance of it, until she sees fit to drop him.  When that moment arrives she can make him let go, and lower away all right.  Just now Hartley is hanging on quite perceptibly, and if it entertains you to slang him behind his back, I suppose you will slang him, but he won’t drop off before you’ve done with him, Clarice, if I know anything of your methods.”  Her face flushed and she began to look angry.  “Mind you, I don’t object to Hartley.  As you say, he’s a fool, a silly, trusting ass, the sort of man who is child’s-play to a girl of sixteen.  If you must have a string of loafers to prove that your attractions outwear anno domini, I must accept Hartley, and other Hartleys, so long as you continue to play the same game. Hartleys, I said, Clarice.”

There was no doubt about the emphasis he laid upon the name.

“You flatter Mr. Hartley considerably,” she said, but her voice was conciliatory and her laugh nervous.

“He represents a type; a type that some married men may be thankful continues to exist.  God!” he broke out violently, “if he could hear you talk of him, it would be a lesson to the fool, but he won’t hear you.  No man ever does hear these things until the knowledge comes too late to be of any use to him.  You have got to have your strings”—­he shrugged his shoulders—­“because your life isn’t here, in this house; it is at the Club, and at dinners and races and so on, and to be left to your husband is the beginning of the end.  Don’t deny it, Clarice, it’s no earthly use.  Women like you have your own ideas of life, I suppose, and I ought to be thankful they’re no worse.”