Jerry's awakening to Jane, as a personality to be coped with, brought with it a trail of perplexities. He had taken her for granted for so long that it was uncomfortable to get re-adjusted to her. He found himself gazing at her, when they were together, as at some stranger.

"Jerry, is anything the matter with me?" she asked one evening, finally aware of this scrutiny.

"No, of course not; why?"

"I find you staring at me so strangely all the time I'm with you. It makes me self-conscious."

"I beg your pardon."

"Is there something you want to ask me?"

"Has it ever occurred to you that we knew nothing at all about each other when we married?"

"Yes. That was one of the nicest things about us. We took each other for what we were, at the time, and asked no tiresome questions."

"Haven't you any curiosity about my past, Jane?"

"No. I married your present; I'm not concerned with anything else."

"That isn't a bit feminine."

"Then it must be masculine, so we agree on the stupidity of historic autobiography."

"I'm beginning to be interested in your past, Jane."

"Very masculine!" she retorted. "No use, Jerry; it's over and done with. I'm not even interested in it myself."

"Communicativeness is not a vice with you, I may say."

"That was why you married me, if you remember. You spoke of it specially the day of the wedding. I warned you then that 'the Man with the Dumb Wife' had a bad time of it, both while she was dumb and when she was not!"

"A reasonable amount of confidence between husband and wife is desirable, don't you think so?"

"I can't say that I do. Who is to decide what is a reasonable amount—the confidant or the confider? No one can be trusted to say just enough; I like reserve better, myself."

"Do you advocate our not talking at all?"

"Oh, no. About opinions, ideas, facts, by all means let us have an exchange—not personal history—soul deliveries—they take away all the mysteries."

"I suppose that is why I feel sometimes that I am married to you, but that you live in Mars."

"Poor Jerry! Would you like a babbling, cozy, confiding little wife?"

"I don't know that I'm quite up to the mysteries, Jane."

"Would you like to end our experiment, Jerry?" she said quickly.

"No; of course not. What put such an idea into your head?"

"I'm quite sure that I do not give you all you want, in our union."

"Oh, yes, you do, Jane," he said soothingly.

"I give you all you asked for when we married, but no one stands still; new demands grow subconsciously. So it has been with us."

"You mean I don't give you what you want?" he inquired.

"No."

"You want to end it?"

"No."

"What then?"

"If we have the intelligence to realize the situation, we must be able to meet it."

"But how?"

"I don't know yet. We must both consider it deeply."

With this, she closed the interview, and he felt as baffled as when he began it.

He went on with his study of her. She filled his mind. In the nursery she was a happy, twittering, foolish mother, adoring her baby. With him she was now a gay, bantering companion, now a dweller in Mars, with no apparent connection with the earth. With Christiansen she was a sexless challenge, calling to his mind with hers. Bobs transformed her into an affectionate big sister, interested in the doings of all the studio friends. He no sooner collected the data of one rÔle, than she assumed another. Yet with all those ties, she kept an independent aloofness. Jerry felt that, any day, she might tie baby to her back and go forth, leaving them all, without a look behind. He decided that this was the secret of her fascination for them.

The more he thought about her, the more he wanted to know about those unaccountable mornings, what she did, where she spent her freedom. He decided to strike, in his position as assistant nurse, to see if that thwarted her sufficiently to bring a protest. He, therefore, announced that business would take him out of the studio in the early mornings for a week.

"Too bad to spoil your outings," he added.

"Oh, it won't. I'll arrange somehow."

"Those sacred mornings of yours cannot be interfered with, can they?"

"No."

"Why don't you invite me to walk with you some morning?"

"It's more important that you should look after baby."

"Thanks."

"After all, you've never shown any uncontrollable desire to walk with me. Before baby came you always walked alone."

He carried out his plan, with much discomfort to himself, for he hated early rising, but the ruse gained him nothing. Mrs. Biggs arrived and took his place. Not so much as a day was lost to Jane. By the end of the week, his irritation and his curiosity had grown to such a size that he was persuading himself that he owed it to himself to know where she went. After all she was his wife; he had a right to know what she was doing. So for two mornings when Jane went to the tenement room to write, Jerry sauntered along far enough behind her to escape detection. Both days he saw her disappear up the tenement stairs, and half an hour of waiting did not see her come down again. But Mrs. Biggs was at the studio. What could Jane be doing in that building?

The third day he was rewarded for his trouble. Shortly after she had entered the building he saw Christiansen arrive. He evidently whistled up the tube, for she came down at once and they went away, talking earnestly. Jane seemed excited. Jerry rushed around the corner and up the block. At the next crossing he came sauntering toward them.

"Oh, Jerry!" said Jane, surprised but unembarrassed.

"Good-morning, Mr. Christiansen," said Jerry shortly. "You're an early riser."

"Yes."

"Do you, like my wife, take your exercise at this hour?"

"Sometimes. I exercise all day. I always walk."

"Mr. Christiansen is going with me to do an errand," Jane said.

"Don't let me detain you," Jerry remarked.

"We are in rather a hurry," said Jane unconcernedly.

They went on their way, leaving Jerry to a fine, old-fashioned, male rage. Here was a pretty how-de-do, where his own wife cavalierly dismissed him to go off with her lover. There was no shadow of doubt in his mind that Christiansen was in love with Jane, although, in spite of all the evidence, he could not reconcile it to himself that Jane was in love with Christiansen. But the tenement house, the rendezvous; what did it all mean? Then he went back home and ascended to the nursery.

"Has Mrs. Paxton a key to your apartment, Mrs. Biggs?" he inquired casually.

"Yes, sir. She has to have it to get into her room there. We keep it under the mat."

"Her room?"

"Yes, sir. Didn't you know she kept her old room with me? Oh, mebbe I shouldn't ha' told ye, sir."

"Oh—I suppose she must have told me; I've just forgotten it. Do her friends go there? She's never asked me."

"Oh, no, sir; nobody comes there. A gentleman used to come, but that was before her marriage."

"Big man, gray-black hair?"

"Yes, sir, that's him."

"Baby been asleep all morning?" he forced himself to ask, casually, as if the other conversation was purely incidental.

"Yes, sir. He's a fine sleeper. My boy Billy, now—he was a poor one for sleep." Mrs. Biggs's reminiscences were addressed to space, because Jerry had not heard them. He walked downstairs and paced the studio, trying to make up his mind what to do; whether to bide his time, or to have the whole matter up for discussion the moment Jane returned.

He thought some of going to Bobs for advice, but he gave up that idea. He was so upset that he telephoned his model and broke the appointment. His mind was chaos; groping in it brought up nothing.

After what seemed an eternity of time Jane came in. He heard her stop in the hall to look over the mail. She glanced into the studio, expecting to see him at work.

"Hello, Jerry; model late?" she inquired.

"She's not coming."

"What a bother!"

"Will you come in here a moment, please?"

"Can't now; I hear baby crying."

"Baby can wait."

"No, my dear, time, tide, and baby cannot," she laughed and ran upstairs.

He felt this to be absolutely brazen. He could hear her upstairs laughing and talking to Mrs. Biggs and small Jerry, together with his son's crows of delight.

"Come on up, Jerry; he's awfully jolly this morning," she called over the balcony to him.

"No, thank you," he replied formally.

It added fuel to his blaze that she should take his acquiescence in the situation as a matter of course. He gloomed on for half an hour. Then she appeared with the baby. Jerry pretended to be engrossed in a magazine, and only glanced at his son when she presented him.

"Father is not hospitable this morning, Jerrykins," she remarked, and began a tour of the room, explaining everything to him as they reviewed it.

"This is the latest work of thy respected father, O bald one. Dost like the lady?" Small Jerry yawned and Jane laughed.

"Does art bore thee, my son? That would be a blow to thy humble parents."

The monologue went on and Jerry could have screamed with nerves. When she stopped behind him and remarked:

"Upside down, Jerry? Is this some new mental discipline?" he rose, flung the magazine across the studio and himself out of the door.

Jane looked upon this exposition of temper with some amusement and no concern.

"My son, can you ever grow up to be as little a boy as your father?" she asked smilingly.

When Mrs. Biggs came down she stopped at the door.

"Has he gone out?"

"Who? Mr. Paxton? Yes."

"I blabbed about the room."

"I don't understand."

"He ast me if you had a key," she went on, repeating the conversation, verbatim.

"Oh!" said Jane, a light beginning to dawn.

"I could ha' bit my tongue out...."

"That's all right. I may have forgotten to speak about the room; I don't remember."

"I thought mebbe he was mad. Men are so queer about things."

"No, he wasn't mad, I'm sure. It's all right, Mrs. Biggs. Nine o'clock to-morrow."

"Yes'm."

So that was why Jerry was under a dark cloud. He resented the secret about the room in the tenement.

"Jerrykins, I wonder if thy great-great-great-granddaughter will be able really to call her soul her own. Jerry could have a whole series of workshops, of which I knew nothing, and consider it his business only; but if my soul has one unexplored corner—my body one unexplained resting place—I am no true wife! The times, my son, are always out of joint," she added with a sigh.

Jerry stayed away all day and telephoned he would spend the night at the club. He came in the next morning just in time for his model, to find Jane coming in, too.

"Good-morning, Jerry," she said cheerfully.

"Good-morning."

"Hope you had a pleasant party."

"I did not."

She went upstairs and he into the studio. But at luncheon she precipitated the storm.

"Mrs. Biggs says you asked her if I had a key to her flat?"

"I did," defensively.

"Why not ask me, Jerry?"

"You were off with Christiansen!"

"But I came back in half an hour. Your impatience might have kept until then."

"May I ask why you find it necessary to rent a room in that tenement house?"

"Am I on the witness stand, Jerry, or is this a friendly interest in my doings?"

"I have a right to know why you have such a room."

"What right?"

"The right of your husband!"

"I don't know the sources of that right, Jerry, but I question it. The rights of a husband and wife, it seems to me, must be agreed on between them. I have never demanded an accounting of your time, or where you spend it."

"That's a different matter. A husband has his honour to look out for."

"Honour is the common possession of the husband and the wife, as I see it, Jerry. She looks after it, just as he does."

"When a woman keeps a room and receives her lover there, it's time her husband looked into it."

Jane's face seemed to contract with the control she put on herself.

"You must explain that, Jerry."

"I saw Christiansen go there this morning to meet you."

"Jerry, you were spying?"

"It's my business to know, I tell you. Christiansen has given himself airs around here long enough. He can't make love to you...."

To his utter silencing, Jane laughed. Not bitterly or angrily, but just amusedly.

"Jerry, if it were not so ridiculous, it would be insulting! The idea of Martin Christiansen loving me is so absurd as to need no denial. We have had not one second of sentiment between us. He has never been in my room at Mrs. Biggs's since I married you. As for the room, I keep it as a place to go to work, to think, to be by myself. I pay for it myself; it is my office, if you like—my studio. If this information is a trifle disappointing, Jerry, after the fine melodrama you seem to have worked up, I'm afraid it's your own fault," she said, smiling, and walked out of the room.