During his first year of wedded bliss, Gatewood cut the club.

When Kerns wanted to see him he had to call like other people or, like other people, accept young Mrs.Gatewood's invitations.
"Why," said Gatewood scornfully, "should I, thirty-four years of age and safely married, go to a club?
Why should I, at my age, idle with a lot of idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals?
Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless have any attractions for me ?" Mrs.Gatewood raised her pretty eyes in silence; Kerns returned her amused gaze rather blankly.
"Clubs!" sniffed Gatewood.

"What are clubs but pretexts for wasting time?
What mental, what spiritual stimulus can a man expect to find in a club?
Why, Kerns, when I look back a year and think what I was, and when I look at you and think what you still are--" "John," said Mrs.Gatewood softly.
"Oh, he knows it!" insisted her husband, "don't you, Tommy?
You know the sort of life you're leading, don't you?
You know what a miserable, aimless, selfish, unambitious, pitiable existence an unmarried man leads who lives at his club; don't you ?" "Certainly," said Kerns, blinking into the smiling gaze of Mrs.
Gatewood.
"Then why don't you marry ?" But Kerns had risen and was making his adieus with cheerful decision; and Mrs.Gatewood was laughing as she gave him her slender hand.
"Now I know a girl--" began Gatewood; but his wife was still speaking to Kerns, so he circled around them, politely suppressing the excitement of a sudden idea struggling for utterance.
Mrs.Gatewood was saying: "I do wish John would go to his clubs occasionally.

Because a man is married is no reason for his losing touch with his clubs--" "I know a girl," broke in Gatewood excitedly, laying his arm on Kerns's to detain him; but Kerns slid sideways through the door with a smile so noncommittal that Mrs.Gatewood laughed again and, linking her arm in her husband's, faced partly toward him.

This maneuver, and the slightest pressure of her shoulder, obliged her husband to begin a turning movement, so that Kerns might reasonably make his escape in the middle of Gatewood's sentence; which he did with nimble and circumspect agility.
"I--I know a--" began Gatewood desperately, twisting his head over his shoulder, only to hear the deadened patter of his friend's feet over the velvet stair carpet and the subdued clang of the front door.
"Isn't it extraordinary ?" he said to his wife.