Robert’s mistress had come to town, and Robert asked Eugene to dine with them. In spite of the fact that Robert had talked constantly of his love for Martha, they snapped and snarled at each other throughout the evening. They went to a restaurant on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village for dinner. During the course of the meal several people came in whom Robert knew; the moment he saw them he would call sharply to them or jump up nervously and go to greet them. Then he would bring them back to the table and, in a tone of dogged and sullen intensity, introduce them to Martha, saying: “I want you to meet my wife.” Martha’s face would flush with anger and sullen rage, but she would acknowledge the introduction and mutter a few uncordial words of greeting. As for the people to whom he introduced her, they at first received the news that Martha was his wife with a look of blank stupefaction, managing, at length, to stammer: “B-b-but we didn’t know you were married, Robert! Why didn’t you let someone know about it? When did it happen?”

“About two weeks ago,” he said brusquely, obviously getting a fierce and sullen satisfaction from this absurd lie.

“Where are you living?”

“At the Leopold.”

“Will you be staying there?”

“No, we’re moving out soon.”

“Are you going to live in New York?”

“Yes,” he said doggedly, “we’ve taken an apartment. . . . Going to move in Monday.”

“Why, Robert!” they cried, having now recovered some fluency of speech, “we’re awfully glad to know about this.” And the women with some pretence at cordiality would turn to Martha, saying, “You must come to see us when you’ve settled down,” and the men would wring Robert by the hand, slap him on the back, and dig him in the ribs. It was obvious that Robert derived a fierce and perverse pleasure from his stupid lie, but the girl was in a state of smouldering rage which blazed out at him the moment his friends had gone away. “You damn fool,” she snapped, “what do you mean by telling a lie like that?”

“It’s not a lie,” he said, “it’s the truth. You’re my wife in everything but name!”

“You’re a liar! Take that back! Don’t you believe him.” she said to Eugene, “there’s not a word of truth in what he says. . . . You damned fool!” she blazed out at him. “What do you mean by telling your friends a story like that? Don’t you know they’re going to find out that you lied to them? And then,” she added bitterly, “what are they going to say about me? You never thought of that, did you? Oh, no! You don’t care if you ruin me or not! All you think of is yourself!”

“I don’t care,” he said with a sullen fierceness, “you’re my wife and that’s what I’m going to tell them all!”

“You’re not!”

“I am! I’ll show you if I don’t!”

“I’m not your wife, and you needn’t be so sure I ever will be! I got married once to a sick man, and I’ll think it over a good long time, I assure you, before I get married again to a crazy man! Now, you’d better not be too sure of yourself, Mr. Weaver! You’re not married to me yet by a long shot!”

A bitter quarrel broke out between them: they snarled, snapped, sneered, and wrangled — their voices rose until people at other tables began to look at them and listen curiously, but they paid no attention whatever to anyone but themselves. Robert ended the argument suddenly by pushing his chair back from the table, sighing heavily, and saying feverishly and impatiently:

“All right, all right, all right! You’re right! I’m wrong! Only, for God’s sake, shut up and let me have a little peace!” Then they got into a taxi and went back to the hotel. They had a bottle of whisky and they all went up to Robert’s room, telephoned for ice and ginger ale, and began to drink. It was a little before midnight.

About two o’clock that night, as they sat there, a light, odd step, approaching briskly, came down the corridor and paused outside Robert’s door; then someone rapped lightly and sharply at the door, and with this same movement of an odd, light and exuberant vitality. They looked at one another with the sudden startled look of people who feel the interruption of an intense silence around them — for the Leopold for two hours had been steeped in this silence of sleep, and they now experienced its living and animate presence for the first time. A good many sensations of guilt — all but the real one — flashed through their minds: that they had been drinking and making more noise than they should, and that a guest had complained to the office about them; or that someone had discovered that Robert had a woman in his room, and that, in the interests of hotel decorum, she was to be commanded to leave and go to her own quarters. The rapping at the door was repeated, more brisk and loud. They were all very still, Robert looked at Eugene nervously, remembering, perhaps, the sum of his past errors at the hotel and his precarious standing there.

“You go see who it is,” he said.

Eugene went to the door and opened it. A man — or rather, the wisp, the breath, the fume of what had been a man — stood there: it was a small figure with nothing on its skeleton of fragile bone which was recognizable as living flesh, with only the covering, it seemed, of a parchment-like skin so tightly drawn over the contours of the face and head that the skull widened and flared with an impression of enormous dome-like width and depth above a face so wizened and shrunken that one remembered it later only as a feverish glint of teeth, an unshaved furze of beard, and two blazing flags of red, darkened and shadowed by the sunken depth of the sockets of the eye, where burned a stare of an incredible size and brilliance — that and the whispering ghost of a voice, the final, dominant, and unforgettable impression.

This wraith was clothed, or rather, engulfed, in garments which, although of good cut and quality, it seemed never to have worn before: they swathed it round and fell away in shapeless folds so that the body was as indecipherable among them as a stick, and the neck emerged from a collar through which it seemed the whole figure of the man might have slipped as easily as through a hoop.

And yet the creature was burning with a savage energy which coursed like an electric current through his withered body: it bore him along at a light, odd step, capricious and buoyant as the bobbing of a cork, and it foamed and bubbled in him now as he stood impatiently rapping at the door, and it blazed in his eyes with a corrupt and fatal glee, a mad flaming exuberance, a focal intensity of triumph, joy, and hate.

He entered the room immediately as soon as Eugene opened the door: he went in briskly at his light corky step and immediately said briskly and jovially in his whispering thread of a voice: “Good evening! Are we all here? Is everyone well? Did someone say something?”— he looked round enquiringly, then, with a disappointed air, continued: “No? I thought someone spoke. Well, then, come in, Mr. Upshaw. Thank you, I will. Won’t you sit down? Yes, indeed!” He seated himself. “Will you have a drink? I should be delighted”— here he took the bottle, poured a stiff shot of whisky into a glass, and drank it at one gulp. When he had finished, he looked round more quietly until his gaze rested with a kind of evil temperance on his wife: “Hello, Martha,” he said casually and quietly. “How are you?” She did not answer and in a minute he repeated, still with his evil calm but with a more vicious intensity of tone, “Listen, you God-damned bitch! . . . When I ask you a question, you answer. How are you?”

“How did you get here?” she said.

“Oh! — Surprised to see me, is she? — Well, I tell you, darling, how it was. I was going to walk — I was going to walk, if necessary — now that just shows you how anxious I was to see you — I was going to walk the whole damned way from Denver, right over mountains and prairies and rivers and everything — but I didn’t have to. I found a train all ready to go, darling; it was waiting for me when I got there, so ‘Why walk?’ I said. When I got to Kansas City I found an aeroplane waiting there, so I said, ‘Why ride when flying’s faster?’ So that’s the way I got here, darling.”— He paused and drank again.

“How did you know where to find me?” asked Martha sullenly.

“Oh!” said Upshaw, lightly and gaily, “that was no trouble at all. Where should I find you, my dear? Where did I expect to find you? Why, right in the bedroom of my dear old pal, Mr. Robert Weaver, of course, I knew he’d look after you. I knew he wouldn’t leave an innocent young girl like you to wander around all alone in the city. . . . Hi, there, Robert,” he said cordially, lifting his hand in a salute of friendly greeting, as if noting Robert’s presence for the first time.

“How are you, boy? I’m glad to see you. You’ve been looking after my wife, haven’t you, Robert? You took care of her, didn’t you? I’m much obliged to you. . . . You son of a bitch,” he added quietly and slowly, and with an accent of infinite loathing.

No one spoke, and after gazing at his wife a moment longer with this same air of evil quietness, he said, in a tone of mock surprise: “Why, what’s the matter? You don’t look a bit glad to see me, darling. Most men’s wives would be wild about a husband who flew across the country in an aeroplane to see them, most women would be crazy about that.”

“I wish,” the girl said bitterly, “that you had fallen into a river and drowned.”

“Now, is THAT nice? Is THAT kind?” said Upshaw in a tone of grieved reproach.

He turned toward Eugene and spoke to him for the first time. . . . “Now, I leave it to you, Mr. —” he hesitated, “I didn’t catch your name, sir, but is it all right if I call you Mr. Whipple?”

“Yes,” Eugene said. “It’s all right.”

“Good!” he cried. “I knew it would be. The reason I say that is I used to have a friend out in Cleveland named Charley Whipple, who was just the same type of fellow that you are — YOU know,” he said quietly and sneeringly, “a fine clean-cut fellow, eyes glowing with health, beautiful complexion, broad-shouldered, both feet on the ground, good to his mother. — Oh! he was a prince! — Just the same sort of looking fellow you are — so you won’t mind if I call you by his name, will you? You remind me so much of him. Well, now, Mr. Whipple, I ask you if you think it’s nice for a man’s wife to talk to him like this? Is it kind? Is it fair?”

“She’s not your wife,” said Robert. “She’s my wife.”

For the first time Upshaw turned and faced his enemy squarely: he surveyed him slowly, up and down, with eyes which burned and glittered with their hatred. “Did you say something?” he asked.

“You heard me,” said Robert.

“Did anyone speak to you? Did anyone say anything to you?” Upshaw whispered. He was silent a moment; then he leaned forward slightly over the table. “Let me give you some advice,” he said. “The only pity about this is that you’re not going to be able to use it. — But I’m going to give it to you, anyway: here it is — Don’t fool with a dying man, Robert. If you’re going to play around with anyone, play around with the living, and not with the dead. Dead men are bad people to play around with.”

“All right! All right!” cried Robert in a hoarse, excited tone. “That constitutes a threat! . . . Martha, Eugene. . . . I call on you to bear witness that he threatened me! We’ll just see how that sounds in a court of law.”

“Courts! Law!” said Upshaw; and even as he spoke they all felt instantly how preposterous was Robert’s threat and how meaningless such terms had be............