Except for Eliot and Curtiss Havock, the men in what, till a few weeks ago, had been Neil and Vestal’s “bunch” were not a lecherous lot. They were solid homecomers who would have been embarrassed in strange bedrooms and impotent at the sight of a pink valence. They would have defined “venery” (if they had ever tried to define any words besides trade-balance, torque, and this-here-Fascism) as “sports of the hunting-field,” not as “sports of the boudoir.” But Eliot made up for the timidity of his peers. He was the specialist in goatishness as Judd Browler was the master of trout flies and Tom Crenway of salad-dressing. Just to be seen smiling privily with Eliot was enough to give a bored wife a secondary thrill and an interesting reputation. In the cosmos of Grand Republic, you can find everything, even if in miniature, and Eliot Hansen was Casanova and Solomon and the purer parts of the Marquis de Sade as condensed for newsstand sale in a reprint magazine.

Even to be in Eliot’s house, alone with his wife Daisy, was considered suggestive, and Vestal found herself there only because she was on the flower committee of the church, along with Daisy, Pomona Browler and Violet Crenway. They had tea at Daisy’s and, to their fury, were given tea at the tea, and as they all disliked one another, they concentrated on Vestal and hinted that they would be glad to receive any confidences about her troubles with Neil.

“What’s this I hear—that Neil is going to a bigger bank?” chirruped Violet, obviously meaning (or so the agitated Vestal suspected), “What’s the poor zany going to do, now that he’s fired?”

“Is Neil’s leg going to be strong enough for him to play tennis, next summer?” soothed Pomona, probably meaning “Will he dare to poke his nose into our dear little club and take a chance on having big, strong, indignantly family-protective aristocrats like my husband smash that black, flat, intrusive snout?”

Daisy Hansen probed, “I declare, I’m crazy about your husband. When you see so much of him, can he possibly go on being just as wonnerful as the rest of us girls think he is?” and Vestal interpreted this one as “Come on and tell us about refusing to sleep with that horrible swindler, now that you’ve found out he’s a—you know.”

Vestal answered all of them with nothing more than a modest presentation of Neil as the new Apollo with touches of Ajax and St. Sebastian.

Whether the things they said did have these secret meanings, whether their glee in her tragedy was real or a sick imagining, made no difference in Vestal’s uneasiness at being investigated, being the eccentric wife of a Negro, and she felt relieved when Eliot came in with a humming-bird sound of “What, you girls not getting any cocktails? Come on, Ves, help me make one.”