unreliable friend.

"Perhaps--now that I reflect upon it," continued the clever woman,
disliking the clever man's silence, "the person who said all would be
intolerable."

"There are some things which go without it," said De Chauxville.

"Ah?" looking lazily back at him over her shoulder.

"Yes."

He was cautious, for he was fighting on a field which women may rightly
claim for their own. He really loved Etta. He was trying to gauge the
meaning of a little change in her tone toward him--a change so subtle
that few men could have detected it. But Claude de Chauxville
--accomplished steersman through the shoals of human nature,
especially through those very pronounced shoals who call themselves
women of the world--Claude de Chauxville knew the value of the slightest
change of manner, should that change manifest itself more than once.

The ring of indifference, or something dangerously near it, in Etta's
voice had first been noticeable the previous evening, and the attaché
knew it. It had been in her voice whenever she spoke to him then. It was
there now.

"Some things," he continued, in a voice she had never heard before, for
this man was innately artificial, "which a woman usually knows before
they are told to her."