the bickerings of married people if they are in love. It's one way of
having no concealments; it's perfect confidence of a kind--"

"Or unkind," Minver suggested.

"What has all that got to do with it!" Rulledge demanded.

"Nothing directly," Wanhope confessed, "and I'm not sure that it has much
to do indirectly. Still, it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is
very remarkable how thoughts connect themselves with one another. It's a
sort of wireless telegraphy. They do not touch at all; there is
apparently no manner of tie between them, but they communicate--"

"Oh, Lord!" Rulledge fumed.

Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, such as a physician might
feel in the symptoms of a peculiar case. "I wonder," he said absently,
"how much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a survival of the
childhood of the race, and how far it is the effect of conditions in
which possession is the ideal!"

Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away in dudgeon. "I'm a busy
man myself. When you've got anything to say you can send for me."

Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some one should. "Oh, come
back! He's just going to begin;" and when Rulledge, after some pouting,
had been _pushed down into his chair again,_ Wanhope went on, with a
glance of scientific pleasure at him.