night--I'd
just come from the Draytons, and Jack hadn't been home to dinner--that
I heard Rawlins Richardson and Horace Trevano chattering about Maisie
Hartopp. The "Jo-Jo" song had made the biggest kind of a hit that
winter at the Gaiety, and the hit had been made by the Hartopp singing
it to a stage box which the Johnnies scrambled to bid in nightly.

It seemed like small game for Jack Drayton to be trailing along with
the ruck--the ruck meaning Tony Criswold and the rest of that
just-out-of-college crew--but I didn't need signed affidavits, after
five minutes of club chatter, to know that he was pretty well tied to
an avenue window at Cherry's after the show. The Ruinart, too, that
kept spouting from the bucket beside it, was a pet vintage of the
Hartopp.

There was a lot of that silly chuckle, and I recalled reading
somewhere that there was a husband belonging to the Hartopp, a medium
good welterweight, who picked up a living flooring easy marks for
private clubs at Paterson, N. J., and the like, and occasionally
serving as a punching bag for the good uns before a championship mill.
What the devil was there to do? I couldn't answer the riddle.

It sounds like old women's chatter, the meddlesome way I scribble this
down. It would take a real thing in the line of literature to paint me
right, anyway, I fancy. When a third party keeps mixing in with
husband and wife, he deserves all the slanging that's coming to him;
which same is my last squeal for mercy.

A month went by--two of them. Natica Drayton wasn't the strain that
needs spectacles to see through things. Then, too, I guessed the
loving friend sympathy racket was being worked by some of the bridge
whist aggregation which met up with her every fortnight. She laughed
more than she ought to have done. This was a bad sign with her. Once
or twice, when the three of us dined together, and she was almost
noisy over the benedictine, I could have choked Jack Drayton, for he
didn't see. It's not a pretty thing for an outsider to sit _a trois_,
and see things in a wife's manner that the husband doesn't or won't
see; and worse than that, to know that the wife knows you see it and
that he doesn't. Speak to Jack? I wouldn't have done it for worlds. As
I said, I'm willing to burn my fingers and even cuddle the hurt; but I
don't meddle with giant firecrackers except on the Fourth of July, and
that didn't come until afterward.

I was to take her to the opera one night--D