I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the
direction his wife had taken.

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: "Yes, I
like to have a book where I can get at it when we're not going out to the
theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don't care
much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she
finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see,
business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the
reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that's going in that
line. We haven't got any children, and it occupies her mind. She's up to
all sorts of things--she's artistic, and she's musical, and she's
dramatic, and she's literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny,
anyway."

He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making
type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what
his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet
little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her
capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the summer--
but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could have the
rest, anyway; she needed it.

"By-the-way," he asked, "who is this friend of yours? The women are all
crazy about him, and it's been an even thing between my wife and Miss
Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I'll bet on my wife every time,
when it comes to a thing like that. He's a good-looking fellow--some kind
of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is
Altruria, anyway?"