Hazel Cornplow, plump little wife of the plump little man, climbed out of the misty layers of sleep in which she had been nestling, out of the downy strata of the very best poplin and blankets and foamy pink comforter, appropriate to this February night, drowsily wrapped herself in something that was a cross between, a feather boa and a Persian rug ($31.98 at Swazey & Lindbeck’s, this past Christmas), and laid her plump, kind hand on his forehead.

‘My! It does seem hot!’ she exulted, with the pleasure all right-thinking persons feel in discovering that the best-beloved is helpless and that we shall be allowed to manage him.

‘Something I ate. Lunch at the Elks’ Club,’ he croaked, ignorant of how fondly, in what he believed to be a grand and impressive tantrum, he was looking at her.

‘What did you have?’

‘Well — you know — just an ordinary lunch — I was lunching with Walter Lindbeck and Doc Kamerkink — we were talking about coddling the unemployed. I said to the doc, “Where’s this business going to end, that’s what I want to know;” and Walter says . . .’

‘But what did you eat, dear?’

‘Oh. Eat? Well, zy remember it, I had some corn soup, and I wish to thunder you’d try to coax that hired girl to make it for me oftener, no better soup made than a good corn soup with CORN in it, and I had couple pork chops and some pickled beets and pickled watermelon rind and some cucumbers and some pie a la mode — raisin pie it was, with orange ice on it. . .’

Over Hazel’s face — after slumber she looked not her fifty-three, but a fresh thirty — quivered a grin.

Fred held up his hand like a traffic policeman and protested:

‘No! Wait! I know! I guess maybe it wasn’t an entirely sensible lunch. But still, I don’t rate this awful fever just from mixing up my grub a little. Are you going to sit there and gabble while I’m practically dying, you might say?’

‘Oh, I know, Fred. Listen. Sara’s got a clinical thermometer up in her room — she used it for something or other when she was doing charity work in New York. It’ll tell if you really feel bad.’

‘I don’t need any clinical thermometer to tell me how I feel! I just listen to the voice of my inner conscience, and it tells me I feel like the wrath of God!’

‘I’m not,’ she said, with that power of ignoring chatter which a professional wife develops after thirty years, ‘I’m not sure I can read the thermometer right. Isn’t it funny how we brought up two children without thermometers or bran or psychology or any of those new inventions! But I’ll try it.’

She paddled into the wide hall with its landscape wallpaper. She did not seem oppressively worried. When she returned with the thermometer, which she held as though it were composed of dynamite, she spoke not of woe and mortalities, but gossiped, ‘Almost one o’clock, and Sara not in yet.’