“But then, you know, I have never seen your husband,” Egidia was saying to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a North-country fire blazing away in the very height of summer, as usual, was expatiating in the sweetest of voices on her matrimonial unhappiness. She was telling Egidia all the truth, or thought she was, and the novelist, in her double capacity of friend and gatherer of welcome “copy,” was listening sympathetically from her sofa.