eating in a stuffy restaurant, and the butler won't
have gone to bed yet. Run out and get us a theater wagon."

I went out to the carriage man in a trance. The gods, of a deed, were
fighting furiously on Natica's side--for she could not have foreseen
this vantage, readily as she swung her attack by its aid. Exquisite
torture, truly, to flaunt a husband's folly in his own face, over his
own mahogany, with the source of that folly looking on. Drayton's
bounden civility to his wife, and to the other woman, must make him
present himself as a target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the
other woman but dimly suspected it--not being over subtle--and it
smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most
cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is
being seared. Mine fairly crackled.

So we rattled off up the avenue. The only comfortable ones among us
were Natica and Hartopp. He seemed to think the occurrence a pleasant
bit of chance, and he wasn't in the least jealous, not he. I suppose
the wife had him schooled to her stage ways of doing things.

Once he turned to Jack with a chuckle and said: "This is a jossy bit
of luck, ain't it, each of us out with the other man's better?"

Natica laughed shamelessly. "You've such a keen appreciation of the
ridiculous, Mr. Hartopp," she said. And when "Boiler-plate" tried to
deny the insinuation, his wife nudged him on the arm and whispered:
"Shut up, Jim."

There isn't any use in stringing out the amateur theatricals the five
of us indulged in that night. The Drayton servants were too well
chosen to show any surprise at being told to put on a champagne supper
at midnight, and then go to bed before it was served. We sat at that
mahogany table until the candelabra were guttering, and each of us had
toyed more than he ought to have done with his glass. Natica acted as
if she were entertaining in earnest, and for the time being I actually
think she felt that she was. She got the Hartopp to sing her "Jo-Jo"
song, and the Hartopp actually did it as if she enjoyed it. Afterward
Natica induced "Boiler-plate" to tell about the time he mixed it up
with Fitzsimmons for ten rounds.

"It was a lucky punch that put me out," he kept repeating, almost
pathetically. "You know Fitz's lucky punch."

I might have seen what was in the wind if I hadn't been thick-headed,
what with the champagne and the rattles. "Boiler-plate" once started
on the ring, it was