But in all the years of our acquaintance, both she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy's bobbed hair, I had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a domestic "difference." Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident, could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family unity.
I was even so guileless as to suspect nothing, when, in the middle of April, I received a letter from Cornelia, saying that Oliver had gone to Paris for some months to get material for his war book, Lying Abroad for One's Country; that she was taking the children to southern California for an indefinite sojourn; and that she hoped I might visit them when my college work was over—there was something which she wished very much to talk about. I searched through the letter to see if I could discover what it was. To my obtuse perceptions, the point of interest appeared not to be in the main news but in the incidental reference to
