THE AMERICAN
spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down if she refuses Bluebeard. The simple truth is that they've made a fuss about her milliner's bill or refused her an opera-box."
Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain reserve in each direction. "Do you really mean," he asked of the latter, that your friend is being really hustled into a marriage she really shrinks from?"
"I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that sort of thing."
"It's like something in a regular old play," said Newman. "That dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it and might be done again."
"They have a still darker old house in the country, she tells me, and there, during the summer, this scheme must have been hatched."
"Must have been; mind that!" Tristram echoed.
"After all," their visitor suggested after a pause, "she may be in trouble about something else."
"If it's something else then it's something worse." Mrs. Tristram spoke as with high competence.
Newman, silent a while, seemed lost in meditation. "Is it possible," he asked at last, "that they can do that sort of thing over here? that helpless women are thumb-screwed—sentimentally, socially, I mean—into marrying men they object to."
"Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it," said Mrs. Tristram. "There's plenty of the thumb-screw for them everywhere."
"A great deal of that kind of thing goes on in in
111
