She leaned forward towards him and smiled an actress's smile: all in the lips and cheeks, nothing in the eyes. "Don't you realize that everyone is looking at us?" she asked in a honeyed whisper, though there was asperity in her tone.

He looked around. "Why, yes, now you mention it. They seem a friendly enough lot. The old gentleman down there just waved and winked at me."

"If you wink back," she whispered sweetly, "I'll kick your shin so hard that you'll limp the rest of your life." She smiled and patted his hand.

"I don't understand."

"I believe that. They think..." she beckoned him with her finger, and he leaned over the table towards her. "They think we're newlyweds."

"But that's ridiculous!"

"Keep your voice down."

"But why should they think-? I mean, what right do they have to imagine that I'd-"

"Keep your voice down!" she rasped. "The last thing I want is for them to think we're having a lovers' quarrel. That would be meat and drink to them."

He looked again over at the two maiden sisters. The plumper one pursed her lips and shook her head in a gesture that said: naughty, naughty (but adorable) children.

"Ohmygod," he muttered.

"Exactly," she said.

"Well, you need have no fear for your reputation, mademoiselle. I'll see to it that it suffers no harm."

"My reputation is no concern of yours. I'm perfectly capable of defending it myself."

"Perhaps so, but you will have our chambrette to yourself. I'll spend the night sitting up in the smoking car. Staring out the window... alone... cold."

"You'll do nothing of the kind! You-" She controlled the intensity of her voice and forced herself to smile on him as she whispered, "You will notfeed their gossip with the choice morsel that we've had a spat and I've made you spend our wedding night sitting up in the smoking car. You will spend the night sitting up in our chambrette, staring out the window, if you wish, cold perhaps, alone certainly, while I shall be sleeping not a meter away, totally undisturbed by and totally indifferent to your presence. And now, dearest husband, I believe I am ready to order."

"I've lost my appetite," he said petulantly.

"You will, nevertheless, order a full meal. And you will eat every crumb of it. I'll not have these people thinking that we are rushing through dinner so that we can— That we're rushing through dinner."

The waiter's smarmy solicitude extended to placing a bud vase on their table: a single white rose of chastity, soon, presumably, to be dutifully surrendered. She acknowledged the vase with a dry, "How verykind," uttered without unclenching her teeth.

They were halfway through their soup (large bowls only half full, in consideration of the swaying car) when, after a brooding silence, he spoke out in midthought. "It's not as though I were unaware of-or indifferent to-the social injustices that women face every day. Quite the contrary. It's just that... Oh, forget it." He shrugged.

"It's just that... what?" she wondered.

"Well, if you must know, I don't believe that heavy-handed 'social drama' does any good. It may rub the audience's nose in their flaws and failings but it doesn't solve anything. For one thing, social drama preaches only to the ladies of the altar society, and-"

"The ladies of the altar society?"

"That was a figure of speech."

"I hatefigures of speech."

He stared at her. "How can anyone harbor a general antipathy against figures of speech?"

"Nothing easier. I've done it all my life. What's all this about the ladies of the altar society?"

"The only people willing to sit in the gloomy Theatre Libre and let themselves be bludgeoned by great chunks of 'message' are those who already agree with those messages. If you want to persuade the indifferent masses, you've got to put your message into a form that most people enjoy."

"Like your farces, I suppose?"

"Exactly. Now in my last farce-"

"...A mere one-act curtain opener..."

"...In my last farce,I ridiculed the men who consider lonely, unappreciated wives in search of love and understanding to be 'fallen women', while husbands out on the town are thought of as gay blades and sly old rogues."

"Well... maybe." Hm-m, perhaps there was more to this fellow than a handsome face, and that thick curly hair, and those liquid Basque eyes, and that mouth with its upward-"But I'll bet anything that your women are transparent stereotypes, as in all farces: the Domineering Wife; the Pert, Desirable Soubrette; the Volcanic, Seething Femme Fatale; the Innocent, Empry-Headed Ingenue; the Flapping, Fluttering-"

"It's true that playwrights use stock characters to-"

"Don't you try to wriggle out of it by claiming they're just figures of speech!"

"Figures of speech?"

"All right, all right! So I've never grasped just what figures of speech are. Is that a crime? Is it a disgrace not to know the difference between a metaphor and a hyperbole and an anagram and a litotes and a-?"

"An anagram is not a figure of speech."

"Thank God somethingisn't."

"Sh-h-h. They'll think were having our first quarrel." He smiled.

"You think this is all very funny, don't you."

"I think it's good material for a farce. A socialfarce, of course. A farce of Impelling Social Significance. I could have a character like you: charming, determined, fiery, spouting all your suffragette stuff. While the dignified, understanding, oddly attractive playwright looks calmly into her flashing eyes and-"

"...My suffragette stuff?"

"Well, you know what I mean."

She was prevented from telling him that she did not know what he meant, and didn't care to learn, when the waiter came to replace the soup tureen with a large platter of steamed oysters, for it was almost New Years, the traditional season for oysters.

He applied himself with dexterity to liberating the delicious molluscs from their shells, but after the first three, he suddenly realized she was not eating.

"What's wrong? I thought you were hungry."

"I'm famished.I haven't had a decent meal since we received that telegram from Sophie, announcing her intention to marry the brother of an ink slinger who churns out low farces."

"Well, if you're so hungry, why aren't you eating?" He leaned forward and smiled into her eyes as he whispered in his most 'new-husbandly' voice, "You wouldn't want people to think you can't eat because you're all fluttery with anticipation, would you?" He pumped his eyebrows.

Her eyes hardened and she whispered, "I am not eating because one cannot eat oysters with one's gloves on."

"In that case," he said in a caressing tone, but separating his words carefully as though speaking to the village idiot, "why don't you take your gloves off?"

She laid her hand over his and smiled up into his eyes. "I don't take them off because..." she pinched that particularly excruciating spot on the back of the hand known only to girls who have had to learn to avenge the teasing of older brothers "...because, stupid, I'm not wearing a wedding ring. And if there's anything I'd find more repellent than these people thinking I'm your wife, it would be their thinking I'm your mistress."She hissed this last word as she twisted the pinch, hard.

"Ai-i-i!" He snatched his hand from beneath hers and rubbed the back of it, mute accusation in his wounded eyes. "So it's the old she-can't-take-off-her-glove-because-she-isn't-wearing-a-ring problem, is it? All right, I'll show you what a clever farce writer can do. Hm-m-m." His focus seemed to turn inward as he ransacked his imagination for a ploy that would-ah!

"Take off your gloves," he said.

"But, I-"

"Please just do as I say. Take off your gloves."