arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind enough
to be in any measure sure of just what the devil he was going to say.

Moreover he was oppressed by a familiar and stomachless sensation--the
sensation he always had when he tried to high-dive and stood looking
gingerly down from a shaky platform at water that seemed a thousand
miles away and as flat and hard as a blue steel plate. There wasn't any
guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say
When Interrupting a Tete-a-Tete between Your Best Friend and a Dangerous
And Beautiful Woman. He wondered idly if Ted would ever speak to him
again--Mrs. Severance certainly wouldn't--and he rather imagined that
even if Ted and Elinor did get married he would hardly be the welcome
guest he had always expected to be there.

Well, that was what you get for trying to pull a Jonathan when the Saul
in question was behaving a good deal more like David in the affair with
Uriah the Hittite's spouse--and it wasn't safe and Biblical and all
done with a couple of thousand years ago but abashingly real and now
happening directly under your own astonished eyes. He licked his lips a
little nervously--they seemed to be rather dry. No use standing outside
the door like a wooden statue of Unwelcome Propriety anyhow--the thing
had to be done, that was all--and he pushed the bell-button with all the
decision he could force into his finger.

The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by
giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again.

It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally--and the moment he saw her
face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had
been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was
emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and
impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has
been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its
substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with
her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made
together out of light and gilded cloud--he had somehow never imagined
that she could be as--lustrous--as that--it gave him the sensation
that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty
lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very
glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then
he realize