“Then what took you to Medfield?” Eleanor asked, simply.

“Medfield!”

“I saw you out there this afternoon,” she said; “you were talking to a woman.  I supposed she was a tenant.  I got off the car to walk home with you, but I wasn’t sure of the house; they were all alike.”

“What were you doing in Medfield?”

“Oh, Hannah has given notice; I was hunting for a cook.  I heard of one out on Bell Street.”

“Did you find her?”

“No,” Eleanor said, sighing, “it’s perfectly awful!”

“Too bad!” her husband sympathized.

In the parlor, after dinner, while Eleanor was getting out the cards for solitaire, Maurice, tingling with alarm and irritation, sat down at the piano and banged out all sorts of chords and discords.  “Lily’ll have to move,” he was saying to himself. (Bang—­Bang!) His Imagination raced with the possibilities of what would have happened if Eleanor had found the house which was “like all the other houses,” and heard his “good-by” to Lily, or perhaps even caught the latest addition to Jacky’s vocabulary!  “The jig would have been up,” he thought.  (Bang—­Crash!)...  “She’ll have to move!  Suppose Eleanor took it into her head to hunt her up?  She’s capable of it!” (Crash!)

Eleanor’s absorption in the cook she could not find kept her for nearly forty-eight hours from speculation as to what, if not office business, took Maurice to Medfield.  When she did begin to speculate she said to herself, “He doesn’t tell me things about his business!” Then she was stabbed again by his annoyance because she had opened the letter from Mr. Houghton; then by his secretiveness in regard to that adventure on the river with Mrs. Morton. (He had told Edith!) Then this—­then that—­and by and by a tiny heap of nothings, that implied reserves.  He wasn’t confidential.  She told him everything!  She never kept a thing from him!  And he didn’t even tell her why he was over in Medfield when no real-estate matters took him there.  Why should he not tell her?  And when she said that, the inevitable answer came:  He didn’t tell her, because he didn’t want her to know!  Perhaps he had friends there?  No.  No friends of Maurice’s could live in such a locality.  Well, perhaps there was some woman?  Even as she said this, she was ashamed.  She knew she didn’t believe it.  Of course there wasn’t any woman!...  But, at any rate, he had interests in Medfield that he did not tell her about.  She hinted this to him at breakfast the next morning.  She had not meant to speak of it; she knew she would be sorry if she did.  Eleanor was incapable of analysis, but she was, in her pitiful way, aware that jealousy, when articulate, is almost always vulgar—­perhaps because the decorums of breeding (which insist that, for the sake of others, one’s own pain must be hidden) are not propped up by the reserves of pride.  At any rate, she was not often publicly bitter to Maurice.  This time, however, she was.