“That’s her mistake.  Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it with your horrible profanity.”

“I can’t help it, Edie.  She’s so funny with it.  She makes me profane.”

“Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny—­”

“I do.  I think she’s furiously funny, and horribly pathetic.  All the time, you know, she thinks she’s leading me upward.  Profanity’s my only refuge from hypocrisy.”

“Oh no, not your only refuge.  You say she thinks she’s leading you.  Don’t let her think it.  Make her think you’re leading her.”

“Do you think,” said Majendie, “she’d enjoy that quite so much?”

“She’d enjoy it more.  If you took her the right way.  The way I mean.”

“What’s that?”

“You must find out,” said she.  “I’m not going to tell you everything.”

Majendie became thoughtful.  “My only fear was that I couldn’t keep it up.  But you really don’t think, then, that I should score much if I did?”

“No, my dear, I don’t.  And as for keeping it up, you never could.  And if you did she’d never understand what you were doing it for.  That’s not the way to show you’re in love with her.”

“But that’s just what I don’t want her to see.  That’s what she hates so much in me.  I’ve always understood that in these matters it’s discreeter not to show your hand too plainly.  You see, it’s just as if we’d never been married, for all she cares.  That’s the trouble.”

“There’s something in that.  If she’s not in love with you—­”

“Look here, Edie, you’re a woman, and you know all about them.  Do you really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?”

“Oh, don’t ask me.  How should I know?”

“No, but,” he persisted, “what do you think?”

“I think she was in love.”

“But not with me, though?”

“No, no, not with you.”

“With whom, then?”

“Darling idiot, there wasn’t any who.  If there was, do you think I’d give her away like that?  If you’d asked me what she was in love with—­”

“Well, what then?”

“Your goodness.  She was head over ears in love with that.”

“I see.  With something that I wasn’t.”

“No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn’t know it.”

“Then,” said Majendie, “you can’t get out of it, she’s in love with me.”

“Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you.  To be in love with you she’d have to be in love with everything you’re not, as well as everything you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were, with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be, should be.”

“That’s a large order, Edie.”

“There’s a larger one than that.  She might sweep all that overboard, see it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable you.  That,” said Edie, triumphant in her wisdom, “is what being in love is.”