where have you been?” Awful realisation creeps over us all that the sitting-room door has been left open. I say hurriedly: “Have you read the new Michael Arlen, Miss Milsom?” We are all aware that a prolonged cross-examination is proceeding. Lathom fidgets. Voice rises to appalling distinctness: “Don’t talk nonsense! How long were you at the hairdresser’s?—Well, what were you doing?—Yes, but what kept you?—Yes, of course, you met somebody. You seem to be meeting a lot of people lately!—I don’t care who it ‘only’ was—one of the men from the office, I suppose—Carrie Mortimer? nonsense!—I shall not be quiet—I shall talk as loudly as I like—Did you or did you not remember—?” Here I grow desperate and turn on the gramophone. In comes Harrison, putting a good face on it. “Here’s the wife, late as usual!” We sit down to dinner in embarrassed silence. I murmur eulogies on the chicken. “Overcooked,” says Harrison, shovelling it all aside and savagely picking at the vegetables. After this, everybody is afraid to eat it, for fear of not seeming to know good food from bad. “It seems delicious to me, Mr. Harrison,” says Miss Milsom, profiting nothing from long experience. “Oh,” says Harrison, sourly, “you women don’t care what you eat. It’s overdone, isn’t it, Lathom?” Lathom, quite helpless with rage, says in a strangulated voice, that he thinks it’s just right. “Well, you’re not eating it,” says Harrison, gloomily triumphant. By this time everybody’s appetite is taken thoroughly away. There is nothing on earth the matter with the chicken, but we all sit staring at it as though it was a Harpagus-feast of boiled baby.
Well, I’ll spare you the rest of the nightmare. The point is that this time, Mrs. Harrison didn’t come in bubblingly eager to say where she had been and what she had been doing—and that next time the alibi will hold water—and then Harrison will start saying that you can’t trust women, and will very likely be perfectly justified.
Bungie—I see how these things happen, but how does one insure against them? What security have we that we—you and I, with all our talk of freedom and frankness—shall not come to this?