. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side
face."

"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to
me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four.

Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed,
as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other.
Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the
clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low,
vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!"
Emma knew he was pursuing the daily _schrecklichkeit_.

Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June,
the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household,
pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon
it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest:

"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who
aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the _Times_
delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies
for it, mornings."

It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong,
its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes.

"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him.

"You take it, dear."

"Oh, no! No."

She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing
tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess.

"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--"

"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three
years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't
endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I
shall have to consider our marriage a failure."

"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--"

"I am. But there's something about having it read to you--"

On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her
blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was
shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs
with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the
hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment--just the fraction
of a minute--when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly.
Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers.
They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their g