rious and more conclusive than anything else:

(6) I waked up in the night and was sure I heard Felicia crying softly
and cautiously. As I moved, the sobs stopped and Felicia feigned a
deep sleep.

So for a week a secret walked between us. We put out our hands toward
each other, and its invisible presence kept them from meeting. We felt
the constraint as of a third person always with us, and that third
person was the Secret. We asked mute, unintelligible questions of each
other.

A less subtle mind than my own would have put it crudely that things
were strained and uncomfortable at home.

Meantime, if the Secret sneaked around us, silent, malignant,
invisible, Monty Saunders, for this was his horrid name, was obvious
in every way. It seemed to me that his loud laugh rang perpetually
through my house, that Felicia was always coming in or going out with
him, that wherever we went he was already waiting for us, and that all
the time he was engaged in eating up our happiness, Felicia's and
mine, as fast as ever he could.

I believe now that his ubiquitousness was partly due to my excited
imagination.

This, as I have said, was the situation for one week after I had
acknowledged my Constitutional Inability to Interfere--and on the
eighth evening Felicia and I were to go to a large studio dance. I
dressed with all the groans common, I believe, to the male animal out
of temper. I interspersed my dressing with such remarks as:

"Felicia, I wish you would have them change the laundry man, this
waistcoat's beastly."

I spoiled three ties in tying, I was sceptical of my clothes having
been pressed, while Felicia proceeded unerringly, even with a certain
pleasure, through the intricacies of her own toilet, looking more
disturbingly lovely every minute.

Finally she remarked contemplatively:

"How do you suppose you ever got dressed in time for anything before
you were married?" which was insulting, for I had only asked where two
things were.

She put her head back through the door to say to me with an
impertinent grin:

"Your hat, you know, is in its box on the shelf where it always is,"
and she looked so pretty that an unreasonable desire arose in me to
kill Monty Saunders, and I thought how terrible it must be to feel
jealous, if one could feel as I did when one was only sore and sorry.

I mention this episode only to throw in greater relief what happened
later that evening.

For later that evening a gay littl