under her finger nail and suffered a slight
infection.

Yet there was something about Emma Jett--eight years of married life
had not dissipated it--that was not eupeptic; something of the sear and
yellow leaf of perpetual spinsterhood. She was a wintry little body
whose wide marriage band always hung loosely on her finger with an air
of not belonging; wore an invariable knitted shawl iced with beads
across her round shoulders, and frizzed her graying bangs, which,
although fruit of her scalp, had a set-on look. Even the softness to her
kind gray eyes was cozy rather than warm.

She could look out tabbily from above a lap of handiwork, but in her
boudoir wrapper of gray flannelette scalloped in black she was scrawny,
almost rangy, like a horse whose ribs show.

"I can no more imagine those two courting," Mrs. Keller, a proud twin
herself and proud mother of twins, remarked one afternoon to a euchre
group. "They must have sat company by correspondence. Why, they won't
even kiss when he comes home if there's anybody in the room!"

"They kiss, all right," volunteered Mrs. Dang of the bay-window alcove
room, "and she waves him good-by every morning clear down the block."

"You can't tell about anybody nowadays," vouchsafed some one,
tremendously.

But in the end the consensus of opinion, unanimous to the vote, was:
Lovely woman, Mrs. Jett.

Nice couple; so unassuming. The goodness looks out of her face; and so
reserved!

But it was this aura of reserve that kept Mrs. Jett, not without a bit
of secret heartache about it, as remote from the little world about her
as the yolk of an egg is remote from the white. Surrounded, yet no part
of those surroundings. No osmosis took place.

Almost daily, in some one or another's room, over Honiton lace or the
making of steel-bead chatelaine bags, then so much in vogue, those
immediate, plushy-voiced gatherings of the members of the plain gold
circle took place. Delicious hours of confidence, confab, and the
exchanges of the connubially loquacious.

The supreme _lese majeste_ of the married woman who wears her state of
wedlock like a crown of blessed thorns; bleeds ecstatically and swaps
afternoon-long intimacies, made nasty by the plush in her voice, with
her sisters of the matrimonial dynasty.

Mrs. Jett was also bidden, by her divine right, to those conclaves of
the wives, and faithfully she attended, but on the rim, as it were.
Bitterly silent she sat to the swap of: