thoughtfully at his cigarette. "If I were you I should stop that sort
of thing at the source. It's a habit that can't be discouraged in a
husband too early. Scowling is the civilized man's substitute for
wife-beating."

Jill moved uncomfortably in her chair. Her quick temper resented his
tone. There was a hostility, a hardly veiled contempt in his voice
which stung her. Derek was sacred. Whoever criticized him, presumed.
Wally, a few minutes before a friend and an agreeable companion,
seemed to her to have changed. He was once more the boy whom she had
disliked in the old days. There was a gleam in her eyes which should
have warned him, but he went on.

"I should imagine that this Derek of yours is not one of our leading
sunbeams. Well, I suppose he could hardly be, if that's his mother
and there is anything in heredity."

"Please don't criticize Derek," said Jill coldly.

"I was only saying . . ."

"Never mind. I don't like it."

A slow flush crept over Wally's face. He made no reply, and there
fell between them a silence that was like a shadow. Jill sipped her
coffee miserably. She was regretting that little spurt of temper. She
wished she could have recalled the words. Not that it was the actual
words that had torn asunder this gossamer thing, the friendship which
they had begun to weave like some fragile web: it was her manner, the
manner of the princess rebuking an underling. She knew that, if she