"Damn foolishness," gurgled the Heavy Business Friend, sipping his port.

"Of course you can't really discuss it with women," murmured the Host.

"Oh, no," assented all the others. Even the Half Man sipped his wine and turned traitor, there being no one to see.

"You see," said the Host, "if my wife likes to go to meetings and be on committees, why, I don't stop her."

"Neither do I mine," said the Heavy Friend. "It amuses her, so I let her do it." His wife, the Lady-with-the-Bust, was safely out of hearing.

"I remember once," began the Interesting Man, "saying to"—he paused a moment, for the others were looking at him—"another man that if women did get the vote they'd never use it, anyway. All they like is being talked about for not getting it."

After which, having exhausted the Woman Question, the five men turned to such bigger subjects as the fall in sterling exchange and the President's seventeenth note to Germany.

Then presently they went upstairs. And when they reached the door of the drawing-room a keen observer, or, indeed, any kind of observer, might have seen that all five of them made an obvious advance towards the two empty seats beside the Soft Lady.

VII - The Grass Bachelor's Guide with Sincere Apologies to the Ladies' Periodicals

*

There are periods in the life of every married man when he is turned for the time being into a grass bachelor.

This happens, for instance, in the summer time when his wife is summering by the sea, and he himself is simmering in the city. It happens also in the autumn when his wife is in Virginia playing golf in order to restore her shattered nerves after the fatigues of the seaside. It occurs again in November when his wife is in the Adirondacks to get the benefit of the altitude, and later on through the winter when she is down in Florida to get the benefit of the latitude. The breaking up of the winter being, notoriously, a trying time on the system, any reasonable man is apt to consent to his wife's going to California. In the later spring, the season of the bursting flowers and the young buds, every woman likes to be with her mother in the country. It is not fair to stop her.