r light. She hated to think.

'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what
prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the fear of
being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the corpse, and so
on.'

Vera shuddered.

'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very much
more wicked than lots of other things.'

'Usury, for instance,' Cheswardine put in.

'Or bigamy,' said Woodruff.

'But an Englishman COULDN'T kill a mandarin in China by just wishing
it,' said Vera, looking up.

'How do we know?' said Woodruff, in his patient voice. 'How do we know?
You remember what I was telling you about thought-transference last
week. It was in Borderland.'

Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it
angered her to be plunging about in a bog.

'I think it's simply silly,' she remarked. 'No, thanks.'

She said 'No, thanks' to her husband, when he tendered his glass.

He moved the glass still closer to her lips.

'I said "No, thanks,"' she repeated dryly.

'Just a mouthful,' he urged.

'I'm not thirsty.'

'Then you'd better go to bed,' said he.

He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly. She did not dislike it.
But she had various ways of going. Tonight it was the way of an
archduchess.

II

Woodruff, in stating that Vera was all nerves that evening, was quite
right. She was. And neither her husband nor Woodruff knew the reason.

The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.

Vera had been married ten years. But no one would have guessed it, to
watch her girlish figure and her birdlike ways. You see, she was the
only child in the house. She often bitterly regretted the absence of
offspring to the name and honour of Cheswardine. She envied other wives
their babies. She doted on babies. She said continually that in her
deliberate opinion the proper mission of women was babies. She was the
sort of woman that regards a cathedral as a place built especially to
sit in and dream soft domestic dreams; the sort of woman that adores
music simply because it makes her dream. And Vera's brown studies,
which were frequent, consisted chiefly of babies. But as babies amused
themselves by coming down the chimneys of all the other houses in
Bursley, and avoiding her house, she sought comfort in frocks. She made
the best of herself. And it was a good best. Her figure was as near
perfect as a woman's can be, and then there were those f