with me. He knows all about the Troubadours."

And Wilkinson would try and make you believe that they had threshed
out the Troubadours between them. But when Mrs. Norman, who was a
little curious about Wilkinson, asked the Troubadour man what they
_had_ talked about, he smiled and said it was something--some
extraordinary adventure--that had happened to Wilkinson's wife.

People always smiled when they spoke of her. Then, one by one, they
left off dining with Wilkinson. The man who read Nietzsche was quite
rude about it. He said he wasn't going there to be gagged by that
woman. He would have been glad enough to ask Wilkinson to dine with
him if he would go without his wife.

If it had not been for Mrs. Norman the Wilkinsons would have
vanished from the social scene. Mrs. Norman had taken Wilkinson up,
and it was evident that she did not mean to let him go. That, she
would have told you with engaging emphasis, was not her way. She had
seen how things were going, socially, with Wilkinson, and she was
bent on his deliverance.

If anybody could have carried it through, it would have been Mrs.
Norman. She was clever; she was charming; she had a house in
Fitzjohn's Avenue, where she entertained intimately. At forty she
had preserved the best part of her youth and prettiness, and an
income insufficient for Mr. Norman, but enough for her. As she said
in her rather dubious pathos, she had nobody but herself to please
now.

You gathered that if Mr. Norman had been living he would not have
been pleased with her cultivation of the Wilkinsons. She was always
asking them to dinner. They turned up punctually at her delightful
Friday evenings (her little evenings) from nine to eleven. They
dropped in to tea on Sunday afternoons. Mrs. Norman had a wonderful
way of drawing Wilkinson out; while Evey, her unmarried sister, made
prodigious efforts to draw Wilkinson's wife in. "If you could only
make her," said Mrs. Norman, "take an interest in something."

But Evey couldn't make her take an interest in anything. Evey had no
sympathy with her sister's missionary adventure. She saw what Mrs.
Norman wouldn't see--that, if they forced Mrs. Wilkinson on people
who were trying to keep away from her, people would simply keep away
from them. Their Fridays were not so well attended, so delightful,
as they had been. A heavy cloud of dulness seemed to come into the
room, with Mrs. Wilkinson, at nine o'clock. It hung about her chair,
and spre