ry good friend named Max--"

"O, Max! Max is an angel husband. Fancy Max and Norah waxing tragic on
the subject of a gown! Now you--"

"I? Come, you are sworn to good-fellowship. As one comrade to another,
tell me, what sort of husband do you think I should make, eh? The
boorish Nirlanger sort, or the charming Max variety. Come, tell me--you
who always have seemed so--so damnably able to take care of yourself."
His eyes were twinkling in the maddening way they had.

I looked out across the lake to where a line of white-caps was piling up
formidably only to break in futile wrath against the solid wall of the
shore. And there came over me an equally futile wrath; that savage,
unreasoning instinct in women which prompts them to hurt those whom they
love.

"Oh, you!" I began, with Von Gerhard's amused eyes laughing down upon
me. "I should say that you would be more in the Nirlanger style, in your
large, immovable, Germansure way. Not that you would stoop to wrangle
about money or gowns, but that you would control those things. Your
wife will be a placid, blond, rather plump German Fraulein, of excellent
family and no imagination. Men of your type always select negative
wives. Twenty years ago she would have run to bring you your Zeitung and
your slippers. She would be that kind, if Zeitung-and-slipper husbands
still were in existence. You will be fond of her, in a patronizing sort
of way, and she will never know the difference between that and being
loved, not having a great deal of imagination, as I have said before.
And you will go on becoming more and more famous, and she will grow
plumper and more placid, and less and less understanding of what those
komisch medical journals have to say so often about her husband who is
always discovering things. And you will live happily ever after--"

A hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up, startled, into two blue eyes
blazing down into mine. Von Gerhard's face was a painful red. I think
that the hand on my shoulder even shook me a little, there on that bleak
and deserted lake drive. I tried to wrench my shoulder free with a jerk.

"You are hurting me!" I cried.

A quiver of pain passed over the face that I had thought so calmly
unemotional. "You talk of hurts! You, who set out deliberately and
maliciously to make me suffer! How dare you then talk to me like this!
You stab with a hundred knives--you, who know how I--"

"I'm sorry," I put in, contritely. "Please don't be so dr