But Jennifer would allow no comment here. She fought off her tears and dropped down on the rug before the fire in her own sitting-room.
"Put on some more wood, Slicker," she said. "Pine, please; I like the smell. Now, tell me what you have all been doing to Mr. Tempest since I've been away. He looks as if part of him didn't belong to him, somehow."
Slicker followed her lead thankfully. He, too, knew Jennifer's courage.
"It doesn't," he said. "It belongs to Grange's Andree."
Grange's Andree presented herself vaguely to Jennifer's memory as a tall girl with short black curls who had carried the little dishes of beans and corn on the last occasion when she had supped at Grange's hotel.
"I don't understand," she said. "That girl is—is only"
"Exactly, honey. Tempest has discovered that she's only about all there is to things. She has done up less high-flown sensitive chaps than Tempest, so you can just guess if she's making hay of him. His work is only the husk to him now. It used to be the core"
"How did you know all this?"
"How?" Slicker shrugged his shoulders. His ideas concerning love and human nature were increasing in severity. "Because he's a fool. Men like Tempest usually love as they work—over-time. Everybody knows it."
Jennifer winced. She knew enough of Tempest to know that something sacred was being despoiled here. She forgot what was going forward in the next room and turned her rage on Slicker.
"Why don't you try to stop it?" she cried. "How dare you let a thing like that go on, and you in the middle of it? You stupid boy"
"Because I'm a boy I can't stop it. You should do that. He might listen to you. You're a woman."
Jennifer had never felt the fact and its disadvantages and joys more acutely than of late.
"And a boy—or man—naturally expects the woman to do the unpleasant thing," she retorted.
"It wouldn't be unpleasant for you."
