Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 5 (1927-05).djvu/28

 went on, without giving me time to form my query. "There's a woman—or something—trying to take him away from me!"

"Well—er—my dear young lady, don't you think you would better have consulted a lawyer?" I objected. "Physicians sometimes undertake to patch up leaky hearts, but they are scarcely in the business of repairing outraged affections, you know."

"Mais non, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin denied with a delighted chuckle, "you do misapprehend Madame's statement. Me, I think perhaps she speaks advisedly when she does say 'a woman or something' designs to alienate her husband.

"Proceed, Madame, if you please."

"I graduated from Barnard in '24," Mrs. Penneman took up her statement, "and married Ben last year. We went on a ninety-day cruise for our wedding tour, and moved here as soon as we came back.

"Our class had a reunion at the Allenton Thursday of Christmas week, and some of the girls were crazy about Madame Naîra, the Veiled Prophetess, a fortune-teller up in East Eighty-second Street. They talked about her so much the rest of us decided to pay her a call.

"I was afraid to go by myself, so I teased Ben, my husband, into going with me, and—and he's been acting queer ever since."

"Queer?" I echoed. "How?"

"Well"—she made a vague sort of gesture with one of her small, well-manicured hands and flushed slightly—"you know, Doctor, when two people have been married only six months the star-dust oughtn't to be rubbed off the wings of romance, ought it? Yet Ben's been cooler and cooler to me, commencing almost immediately after we went to see that horrid woman."

"You mean"

"Oh, it's hard to put into words. Just little things, you know; none of them important in themselves, but pretty big in the aggregate. He forgets to kiss me good-bye in the morning, stays over in New York late at night—sometimes without calling me up to let me know he won't be home—and breaks engagements to take me places without warning. Then, when I expostulate, he pleads business."

"But my dear madame," I protested, "this is certainly no case for us. Not every man has the capacity for retaining romance after marriage. Mighty few of them have, I imagine. And it may easily be exactly as your husband says: his business may require his presence in New York at nights. Be reasonable, my dear; when you were first married, he might have strained a point to be home while dinner was still hot, and let his partners handle matters, but you're really old married folks now, you know, and he has to make a living for you both. You'd best let me give you a bromide—this thing may have gotten on your nerves—and go home and forget your silly suspicions."

"And will the bromide keep her—or it—out of my house—out of my bedroom—at night?" Mrs. Penneman asked.

"Eh, what's that?" I demanded.

"That's what made me call on Dr. de Grandin," she replied. "It was bad enough when Ben took to neglecting me, but on the second of last month, while we were in bed, I saw a woman in our room."

"A woman—in your bedroom?" I asked. The story seemed more sordid than I had at first supposed.

"Well, if it wasn't a woman it was something in the shape of one," she replied. "I'd been pretty much upset by Ben's actions, and had reproached him pretty severely the Sunday before when he didn't show up to take me from the Ambersons'