A Modern Chronicle — Complete

CHAPTER VIII. IN WHICH THE LAW BETRAYS A HEART

It was still raining when she got into a carriage at Boston and drove under the elevated tracks, through the narrow, slippery business streets, to the hotel. From the windows of her room, as the night fell, she looked out across the dripping foliage of the Common. Below her, and robbed from that sacred ground, were the little granite buildings that housed the entrances to the subway, and for a long time she stood watching the people crowding into these. Most of them had homes to go to! In the gathering gloom the arc-lights shone, casting yellow streaks on the glistening pavement; wagons and carriages plunged into the maelstrom at the corner; pedestrians dodged and slipped; lightnings flashed from overhead wires, and clanging trolley cars pushed their greater bulk through the mass. And presently the higher toned and more ominous bell of an ambulance sounded on its way to the scene of an accident.

It was Mathilde who ordered her dinner and pressed her to eat. But she had no heart for food. In her bright sitting-room, with the shades tightly drawn, an inexpressible loneliness assailed her. A large engraving of a picture of a sentimental school hung on the wall: she could not bear to look at it, and yet her eyes, from time to time, were fatally drawn thither. It was of a young girl taking leave of her lover, in early Christian times, before entering the arena. It haunted Honora, and wrought upon her imagination to such a pitch that she went into her bedroom to write.

For a long time nothing more was written of the letter than “Dear Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary”: what to say to them?

She tried to review this letter. Incoherent though it were and incomplete, in her present state of mind she was able to add but a few words as a postscript. “I will write you my plans in a day or two, when I see my way more clearly. I would fly to you—but I cannot. I am going to get a divorce.”

She sat for a time picturing the scene in the sitting-room when they should read it, and a longing which was almost irresistible seized her to go back to that shelter. One force alone held her in misery where she was,—her love for Chiltern; it drew her on to suffer the horrors of exile and publicity. When she suffered most, his image rose before her, and she kissed the ring on her hand. Where was he now, on this rainy night? On the seas?

At the thought she heard again the fog-horns and the sirens.

Her sleep was fitful. Many times she went over again her talk with Howard, and she surprised herself by wondering what he had thought and felt since her departure. And ever and anon she was startled out of chimerical dreams by the clamour of bells-the trolley cars on their ceaseless round passing below. At last came the slumber of exhaustion.

It was nine o'clock when she awoke and faced the distasteful task she had set herself for the day. In her predicament she descended to the office, where the face of one of the clerks attracted her, and she waited until he was unoccupied.

“I should like you to tell me—the name of some reputable lawyer,” she said.

“Certainly, Mrs. Spence,” he replied, and Honora was startled at the sound of her name. She might have realized that he would know her. “I suppose a young lawyer would do—if the matter is not very important.”

“Oh, no!” she cried, blushing to her temples. “A young lawyer would do very well.”

The clerk reflected. He glanced at Honora again; and later in the day she divined what had been going on in his mind.

“Well,” he said, “there are a great many. I happen to think of Mr. Wentworth, because he was in the hotel this morning. He is in the Tremont Building.”

She thanked him hurriedly, and was driven to the Tremont Building, through the soggy street that faced the still dripping trees of the Common. Mounting in the elevator, she read on the glass door amongst the names of the four members of the firm that of Alden Wentworth, and suddenly found herself face to face with the young man, in his private office. He was well groomed and deeply tanned, and he rose to meet her with a smile that revealed a line of perfect white teeth.

“How do you do, Mrs. Spence?” he said. “I did not think, when I met you at Mrs. Grenfell's, that I should see you so soon in Boston. Won't you sit down?”

Honora sat down. There seemed nothing else to do. She remembered him perfectly now, and she realized that the nimble-witted clerk had meant to send her to a gentleman.

“I thought,” she faltered, “I thought I was coming to a—a stranger. They gave me your address at the hotel—when I asked for a lawyer.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Mr. Wentworth, delicately, “perhaps you would prefer to go to some one else. I can give you any number of addresses, if you like.”

She looked up at him gratefully. He seemed very human and understanding,—very honourable. He belonged to her generation, after all, and she feared an older man.

“If you will be kind enough to listen to me, I think I will stay here. It is only a matter of—of knowledge of the law.” She looked at him again, and the pathos of her smile went straight to his heart. For Mr. Wentworth possessed that organ, although he did not wear it on his sleeve.

He crossed the room, closed the door, and sat down beside her.

“Anything I can do,” he said.

She glanced at him once more, helplessly.

“I do not know how to tell you,” she began. “It all seems so dreadful.” She paused, but he had the lawyer's gift of silence—of sympathetic silence. “I want to get a divorce from my husband.”

If Mr. Wentworth was surprised, he concealed it admirably. His attitude of sympathy did not change, but he managed to ask her, in a business-like tone which she welcomed:—“On what grounds?”

“I was going to ask you that question,” said Honora.

This time Mr. Wentworth was surprised—genuinely so, and he showed it.

“But, my dear Mrs. Spence,” he protested, “you must remember that—that I know nothing of the case.”

“What are the grounds one can get divorced on?” she asked.

He coloured a little under his tan.

“They are different in different states,” he replied. “I think—perhaps—the best way would be to read you the Massachusetts statutes.”

“No—wait a moment,” she said. “It's very simple, after all, what I have to tell you. I don't love my husband, and he doesn't love me, and it has become torture to live together. I have left him with his knowledge and consent, and he understands that I will get a divorce.”

Mr. Wentworth appeared to be pondering—perhaps not wholly on the legal aspects of the case thus naively presented. Whatever may have been his private comments, they were hidden. He pronounced tentatively, and a little absently, the word “desertion.”

“If the case could possibly be construed as desertion on your husband's part, you could probably get a divorce in three years in Massachusetts.”

“Three years!” cried Honora, appalled. “I could never wait three years!”

She did not remark the young lawyer's smile, which revealed a greater knowledge of the world than one would have suspected. He said nothing, however.

“Three years!” she repeated. “Why, it can't be, Mr. Wentworth. There are the Waterfords—she was Mrs. Boutwell, you remember. And—and Mrs. Rindge—it was scarcely a year before—”

He had the grace to nod gravely, and to pretend not to notice the confusion in which she halted. Lawyers, even young ones with white teeth and clear eyes, are apt to be a little cynical. He had doubtless seen from the beginning that there was a man in the background. It was not his business to comment or to preach.

“Some of the western states grant divorces on—on much easier terms,” he said politely. “If you care to wait, I will go into our library and look up the laws of those states.”

“I wish you would,” answered Honora. “I don't think I could bear to spend three years in such—in such an anomalous condition. And at any rate I should much rather go West, out of sight, and have it all as quickly over with as possible.”

He bowed, and departed on his quest. And Honora waited, at moments growing hot at the recollection of her conversation with him. Why—she asked herself should the law make it so difficult, and subject her to such humiliation in a course which she felt to be right and natural and noble? Finally, her thoughts becoming too painful, she got up and looked out of the window. And far below her, through the mist, she beheld the burying-ground of Boston's illustrious dead which her cabman had pointed out to her as he passed. She did not hear the door open as Mr. Wentworth returned, and she started at the sound of his voice.

“I take it for granted that you are really serious in this matter, Mrs. Spence,” he said.

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

“And that you have thoroughly reflected,” he continued imperturbably. Evidently, in spite of the cold impartiality of the law, a New England conscience had assailed him in the library. “I cannot take er—the responsibility of advising you as to a course of action. You have asked me the laws of certain western states as to divorce I will read them.”

An office boy followed him, deposited several volumes on the taule, and Mr. Wentworth read from them in a voice magnificently judicial.

“There's not much choice, is there?” she faltered, when he had finished.

He smiled.

“As places of residence—” he began, in an attempt to relieve the pathos.

“Oh, I didn't mean that,” she cried. “Exile is—is exile.” She flushed. After a few moments of hesitation she named at random a state the laws of which required a six months' residence. She contemplated him. “I hardly dare to ask you to give me the name of some reputable lawyer out there.”

He had looked for an instant into her eyes. Men of the law are not invulnerable, particularly at Mr. Wentworth's age, and New England consciences to the contrary notwithstanding. In spite of himself, her eyes had made him a partisan: an accomplice, he told himself afterwards.

“Really, Mrs. Spence,” he began, and caught another appealing look. He remembered the husband now, and a lecture on finance in the Grenfell smoking room which Howard Spence had delivered, and which had grated on Boston sensibility. “It is only right to tell you that our firm does not—does not—take divorce cases—as a rule. Not that we are taking this one,” he added hurriedly. “But as a friend—”

“Oh, thank you!” said Honora.

“Merely as a friend who would be glad to do you a service,” he continued, “I will, during the day, try to get you the name of—of as reputable a lawyer as possible in that place.”

And Mr. Wentworth paused, as red as though he had asked her to marry him.

“How good of you!” she cried. “I shall be at the Touraine until this evening.”

He escorted her through the corridor, bowed her into the elevator, and her spirits had risen perceptibly as she got into her cab and returned to the hotel. There, she studied railroad folders. One confidant was enough, and she dared not even ask the head porter the way to a locality where—it was well known—divorces were sold across a counter. And as she worked over the intricacies of this problem the word her husband had applied to her action recurred to her—precipitate. No doubt Mr. Wentworth, too, had thought her precipitate. Nearly every important act of her life had been precipitate. But she was conscious in this instance of no regret. Delay, she felt, would have killed her. Let her exile begin at once.

She had scarcely finished luncheon when Mr. Wentworth was announced. For reasons best known to himself he had come in person; and he handed her, written on a card, the name of the Honourable David Beckwith.

“I'll have to confess I don't know much about him, Mrs. Spence,” he said, “except that he has been in Congress, and is one of the prominent lawyers of that state.”

The gift of enlisting sympathy and assistance was peculiarly Honora's. And if some one had predicted that morning to Mr. Wentworth that before nightfall he would not only have put a lady in distress on the highroad to obtaining a western divorce (which he had hitherto looked upon as disgraceful), but that likewise he would miss his train for Pride's Crossing, buy the lady's tickets, and see her off at the South Station for Chicago, he would have regarded the prophet as a lunatic. But that is precisely what Mr. Wentworth did. And when, as her train pulled out, Honora bade him goodby, she felt the tug at her heartstrings which comes at parting with an old friend.

“And anything I can do for you here in the East, while—while you are out there, be sure to let me know,” he said.

She promised and waved at him from the platform as he stood motionless, staring after her. Romance had spent a whole day in Boston! And with Mr. Alden Wentworth, of all people!

Fortunately for the sanity of the human race, the tension of grief is variable. Honora, closed in her stateroom, eased herself that night by writing a long, if somewhat undecipherable, letter to Chiltern; and was able, the next day, to read the greater portion of a novel. It was only when she arrived in Chicago, after nightfall, that loneliness again assailed her. She was within nine hours—so the timetable said—of St. Louis! Of all her trials, the homesickness which she experienced as she drove through the deserted streets of the metropolis of the Middle West was perhaps the worst. A great city on Sunday night! What traveller has not felt the depressing effect of it? And, so far as the incoming traveller is concerned, Chicago does not put her best foot forward. The way from the station to the Auditorium Hotel was hacked and bruised—so it seemed—by the cruel battle of trade. And she stared, in a kind of fascination that increased the ache in her heart; at the ugliness and cruelty of the twentieth century.

To have imagination is unquestionably to possess a great capacity for suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers. It ran riot now. The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to wander aimlessly: an elevated train thundered overhead. And presently she found herself the tenant of two rooms in that vast refuge of the homeless, the modern hotel, where she sat until the small hours looking down upon the myriad lights of the shore front, and out beyond them on the black waters of an inland sea.

From Newport to Salomon City, in a state not far from the Pacific tier, is something of a transition in less than a week, though in modern life we should be surprised at nothing. Limited trains are wonderful enough; but what shall be said of the modern mind, that travels faster than light? and much too fast for the pages of a chronicle. Martha Washington and the good ladies of her acquaintance knew nothing about the upper waters of the Missouri, and the words “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer” were not merely literature to them.

'Nous avons change tout cela', although there are yet certain crudities to be eliminated. In these enlightened times, if in one week a lady is not entirely at home with husband number one, in the next week she may have travelled in comparative comfort some two-thirds across a continent, and be on the highroad to husband number two. Why travel? Why have to put up with all this useless expense and worry and waste of time? Why not have one's divorce sent, C.O.D., to one's door, or establish a new branch of the Post-office Department? American enterprise has surely lagged in this.

Seated in a plush-covered rocking-chair that rocked on a track of its own, and thus saved the yellow-and-red hotel carpet, the Honourable Dave Beckwith patiently explained the vexatious process demanded by his particular sovereign state before she should consent to cut the Gordian knot of marriage. And his state—the Honourable Dave remarked—was in the very forefront of enlightenment in this respect: practically all that she demanded was that ladies in Mrs. Spence's predicament should become, pro tempore, her citizens. Married misery did not exist in the Honourable Dave's state, amongst her own bona fide citizens. And, by a wise provision in the Constitution of our glorious American Union, no one state could tie the nuptial knot so tight that another state could not cut it at a blow.

Six months' residence, and a whole year before the divorce could be granted! Honora looked at the plush rocking-chair, the yellow-and-red carpet, the inevitable ice-water on the marble-topped table, and the picture of a lady the shape of a liqueur bottle playing tennis in the late eighties, and sighed. For one who is sensitive to surroundings, that room was a torture chamber.

“But Mr. Beckwith,” she exclaimed, “I never could spend a year here! Isn't there a—house I could get that is a—a little—a little better furnished? And then there is a certain publicity about staying at a hotel.”

The Honourable Dave might have been justly called the friend of ladies in a temporary condition of loneliness. His mission in life was not merely that of a liberator, but his natural goodness led him to perform a hundred acts of kindness to make as comfortable as possible the purgatory of the unfortunates under his charge. He was a man of a remarkable appearance, and not to be lightly forgotten. His hair, above all, fascinated Honora, and she found her eyes continually returning to it. So incredibly short it was, and so incredibly stiff, that it reminded her of the needle points on the cylinder of an old-fashioned music-box; and she wondered, if it were properly inserted, what would be the resultant melody.

The Honourable Dave's head was like a cannon-ball painted white. Across the top of it (a blemish that would undoubtedly have spoiled the tune) was a long scar,—a relic of one of the gentleman's many personal difficulties. He who made the sear, Honora reflected, must have been a strong man. The Honourable Dave, indeed, had fought his way upward through life to the Congress of the United States; and many were the harrowing tales of frontier life he told Honora in the long winter evenings when the blizzards came down the river valley. They would fill a book; unfortunately, not this book. The growing responsibilities of taking care of the lonely ladies that came in increasing numbers to Salomon City from the effeter portions of the continent had at length compelled him to give up his congressional career. The Honourable Dave was unmarried; and, he told Honora, not likely to become so. He was thus at once human and invulnerable, a high priest dedicated to freedom.

It is needless to say that the plush rocking-chair and the picture of the liqueur-bottle lady did not jar on his sensibilities. Like an eminent physician who has never himself experienced neurosis, the Honourable Dave firmly believed that he understood the trouble from which his client was suffering. He had seen many cases of it in ladies from the Atlantic coast: the first had surprised him, no doubt. Salomon City, though it contained the great Boon, was not esthetic. Being a keen student of human nature, he rightly supposed that she would not care to join the colony, but he thought it his duty to mention that there was a colony.

Honora repeated the word.

“Out there,” he said, waving his cigar to the westward, “some of the ladies have ranches.” Some of the gentlemen, too, he added, for it appeared that exiles were not confined to one sex. “It's social—a little too social, I guess,” declared Mr. Beckwith, “for you.” A delicate compliment of differentiation that Honora accepted gravely. “They've got a casino, and they burn a good deal of electricity first and last. They don't bother Salomon City much. Once in a while, in the winter, they come in a bunch to the theatre. Soon as I looked at you I knew you wouldn't want to go there.”

Her exclamation was sufficiently eloquent.

“I've got just the thing for you,” he said. “It looks a little as if I was reaching out into the sanitarium business. Are you acquainted by any chance with Mrs. Boutwell, who married a fellow named Waterford?” he asked, taking momentarily out of his mouth the cigar he was smoking by permission.

Honora confessed, with no great enthusiasm, that she knew the present Mrs. Waterford. Not the least of her tribulations had been to listen to a partial recapitulation, by the Honourable Dave, of the ladies he had assisted to a transfer of husbands. What, indeed, had these ladies to do with her? She felt that the very mention of them tended to soil the pure garments of her martyrdom.

“What I was going to say was this,” the Honourable Dave continued. “Mrs. Boutwell—that is to say Mrs. Waterford—couldn't stand this hotel any more than you, and she felt like you do about the colony, so she rented a little house up on Wylie Street and furnished it from the East. I took the furniture off her hands: it's still in the house, by the way, which hasn't been rented. For I figured it out that another lady would be coming along with the same notions. Now you can look at the house any time you like.”

Although she had to overcome the distaste of its antecedents, the house, or rather the furniture, was too much of a find in Salomon City to be resisted. It had but six rooms, and was of wood, and painted grey, like its twin beside it. But Mrs. Waterford had removed the stained-glass window-lights in the front door, deftly hidden the highly ornamental steam radiators, and made other eliminations and improvements, including the white bookshelves that still contained the lady's winter reading fifty or more yellow-and-green-backed French novels and plays. Honora's first care, after taking possession, was to order her maid to remove these from her sight: but it is to be feared that they found their way, directly, to Mathilde's room. Honora would have liked to fumigate the house; and yet, at the same time, she thanked her stars for it. Mr. Beekwith obligingly found her a cook, and on Thursday evening she sat down to supper in her tiny dining room. She had found a temporary haven, at last.

Suddenly she remembered that it was an anniversary. One week ago that day, in the old garden at Beaulieu, had occurred the momentous event that had changed the current of her life!

CHAPTER IX. WYLIE STREET

There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora's front door, and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours and sat there in the evenings. She preferred to watch the life about her from the window-seat in the little parlour. The word exile suggests, perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation, loneliness. She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was a shock to her: in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate had perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke. Next door, for instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal divorce laws, was a young couple with five children. Honora counted them, from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their way to and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of his time gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk. Six days of the week, about six o'clock in the evening, there was a celebration in the family. Father came home from work! He was a smooth-faced young man whom a fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully—a clerk in the big department store.

He radiated happiness. When opposite Honora's front door he would open his arms—the signal for a race across her lawn. Sometimes it was the little girl, with pigtails the colour of pulled molasses candy, who won the prize of the first kiss: again it was her brother, a year her junior; and when he was raised it was seen that the seat of his trousers was obviously double. But each of the five received a reward, and the baby was invariably lifted out of the perambulator. And finally there was a conjugal kiss on the spindled porch.

The wife was a roly-poly little body. In the mornings, at the side windows, Honora heard her singing as she worked, and sometimes the sun struck with a blinding flash the pan she was in the act of shining. And one day she looked up and nodded and smiled. Strange indeed was the effect upon our heroine of that greeting! It amazed Honora herself. A strange current ran through her and left her hot, and even as she smiled and nodded back, unbidden tears rose scalding to her eyes. What was it? Why was it?

She went downstairs to the little bookcase, filled now with volumes that were not trash. For Hugh's sake, she would try to improve herself this winter by reading serious things. But between her eyes and the book was the little woman's smile. A month before, at Newport, how little she would have valued it.

One morning, as Honora was starting out for her lonely walk—that usually led her to the bare clay banks of the great river—she ran across her neighbour on the sidewalk. The little woman was settling the baby for his airing, and she gave Honora the same dazzling smile.

“Good morning, Mrs. Spence,” she said.

“Good morning,” replied Honora, and in her strange confusion she leaned over the carriage. “Oh, what a beautiful baby!”

“Isn't he!” cried the little woman. “Of all of 'em, I think he's the prize. His father says so. I guess,” she added, “I guess it was because I didn't know so much about 'em when they first began to come. You take my word for it, the best way is to leave 'em alone. Don't dandle 'em. It's hard to keep your hands off 'em, but it's right.”

“I'm sure of it,” said Honora, who was very red.

They made a strange contrast as they stood on that new street, with its new vitrified brick paving and white stone curbs, and new little trees set out in front of new little houses: Mrs. Mayo (for such, Honora's cook had informed her, was her name) in a housekeeper's apron and a shirtwaist, and Honora, almost a head taller, in a walking costume of dark grey that would have done justice to Fifth Avenue. The admiration in the little woman's eyes was undisguised.

“You're getting a bill, I hear,” she said, after a moment.

“A bill?” repeated Honora.

“A bill of divorce,” explained Mrs. Mayo.

Honora was conscious of conflicting emotions: astonishment, resentment, and—most curiously—of relief that the little woman knew it.

“Yes,” she answered.

But Mrs. Mayo did not appear to notice or resent her brevity.

“I took a fancy to you the minute I saw you,” she said. “I can't say as much for the other Easterner that was here last year. But I made up my mind that it must be a mighty mean man who would treat you badly.”

Honora stood as though rooted to the pavement. She found a reply impossible.

“When I think of my luck,” her neighbour continued, “I'm almost ashamed. We were married on fifteen dollars a week. Of course there have been trials, we must always expect that; and we've had to work hard, but—it hasn't hurt us.” She paused and looked up at Honora, and added contritely: “There! I shouldn't have said anything. It's mean of me to talk of my happiness. I'll drop in some afternoon—if you'll let me—when I get through my work,” said the little woman.

“I wish you would,” replied Honora.

She had much to think of on her walk that morning, and new resolutions to make. Here was happiness growing and thriving, so far as she could see, without any of that rarer nourishment she had once thought so necessary. And she had come two thousand miles to behold it.

She walked many miles, as a part of the regimen and discipline to which she had set herself. Her haunting horror in this place, as she thought of the colony of which Mr. Beckwith had spoken and of Mrs. Boutwell's row of French novels, was degeneration. She was resolved to return to Chiltern a better and a wiser and a truer woman, unstained by the ordeal. At the outskirts of the town she halted by the river's bank, breathing deeply of the pure air of the vast plains that surrounded her.

She was seated that afternoon at her desk in the sitting-room upstairs when she heard the tinkle of the door-bell, and remembered her neighbour's promise to call. With something of a pang she pushed back her chair. Since the episode of the morning, the friendship of the little woman had grown to have a definite value; for it was no small thing, in Honora's situation, to feel the presence of a warm heart next door. All day she had been thinking of Mrs. Mayo and her strange happiness, and longing to talk with her again, and dreading it. And while she was bracing herself for the trial Mathilde entered with a card.

“Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute,” she said.

It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.

Honora took the card. For a long time she sat staring at it, while Mathilde waited. It read:

“Madame will see monsieur?”

A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model: “Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his old coat, I think, as there is in his face.” As Honora halted on the threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass window, and his back was to her.

She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity seized her—as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he heard. He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he would, and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment, the delusion that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again, so many times had he mended a world all awry.

He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.

“Why did you come? Why did you come?” she cried.

“To see you, Honora.”

“But you might have—warned me.”

“Yes,” he said, “it's true, I might.”

She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.

“Why aren't you angry?” she said. “You don't believe in what I have done—you don't sympathize with it—you don't understand it.”

“I have come here to try,” he said.

She shook her head.

“You can't—you can't—you never could.”

“Perhaps,” he answered, “it may not be so difficult as you think.”

Grown calmer, she considered this. What did he mean by it? to imply a knowledge of herself?

“It will be useless,” she said inconsequently.

“No,” he said, “it will not be useless.”

She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts are not wasted.

“What do you intend to try to do?” she asked.

He smiled a little.

“To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora.”

She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her larger anxieties. Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to harmonize with his surroundings. At Silverdale, and in the drawing-room of the New York house, and in the little parlour in this far western town. What was it? His permanence? Was it his power? She felt that, but it was a strange kind of power—not like other men's. She felt, as she sat there beside him, that his was a power more difficult to combat. That to defeat it was at once to make it stronger, and to grow weaker. She summoned her pride, she summoned her wrongs: she summoned the ego which had winged its triumphant flight far above his kindly, disapproving eye. He had the ability to make her taste defeat in the very hour of victory. And she knew that, when she fell, he would be there in his strength to lift her up.

“Did—did they tell you to come?” she asked.

“There was no question of that, Honora. I was away when—when they learned you were here. As soon as I returned, I came.”

“Tell me how they feel,” she said, in a low voice.

“They think only of you. And the thought that you are unhappy overshadows all others. They believe that it is to them you should have come, if you were in trouble instead of coming here.”

“How could I?” she cried. “How can you ask? That is what makes it so hard, that I cannot be with them now. But I should only have made them still more unhappy, if I had gone. They would not have understood—they cannot understand who have every reason to believe in marriage, why those to whom it has been a mockery and a torture should be driven to divorce.”

“Why divorce?” he said.

“Do you mean—do you mean that you wish me to give you the reasons why I felt justified in leaving my husband?”

“Not unless you care to,” he replied. “I have no right to demand them. I only ask you to remember, Honora, that you have not explained these reasons very clearly in your letters to your aunt and uncle. They do not understand them. Your uncle was unable, on many accounts, to come here; and he thought that—that as an old friend, you might be willing to talk to me.”

“I can't live with—with my husband,” she cried. “I don't love him, and he doesn't love me. He doesn't know what love is.”

Peter Erwin glanced at her, but she was too absorbed then to see the thing in his eyes. He made no comment.

“We haven't the same tastes, nor—nor the same way of looking at things—the same views about making money—for instance. We became absolute strangers. What more is there to say?” she added, a little defiantly.

“Your husband committed no—flagrant offence against you?” he inquired.

“That would have made him human, at least,” she cried. “It would have proved that he could feel—something. No, all he cares for in the world is to make money, and he doesn't care how he makes it. No woman with an atom of soul can live with a man like that.”

If Peter Erwin deemed this statement a trifle revolutionary, he did not say so.

“So you just—left him,” he said.

“Yes,” said Honora. “He didn't care. He was rather relieved than otherwise. If I had lived with him till I died, I couldn't have made him happy.”

“You tried, and failed,” said Peter.

She flushed.

“I couldn't have made him happier,” she declared, correcting herself. “He has no conception of what real happiness is. He thinks he is happy,-he doesn't need me. He'll be much more—contented without me. I have nothing against him. I was to blame for marrying him, I know. But I have only one life to live, and I can't throw it away, Peter, I can't. And I can't believe that a woman and a man were intended to live together without love. It is too horrible. Surely that isn't your idea of marriage!”

“My idea of marriage isn't worth very much, I'm afraid,” he said. “If I talked about it, I should have to confine myself to theories and—and dreams.”

“The moment I saw your card, Peter, I knew why you had come here,” she said, trying to steady her voice. “It was to induce me to go back to my husband. You don't know how it hurts me to give you pain. I love you—I love you as I love Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary. You are a part of me. But oh, you can't understand! I knew you could not. You have never made any mistakes—you have never lived. It is useless. I won't go back to him. If you stayed here for weeks you could not make me change my mind.”

He was silent.

“You think that I could have prevented—this, if I had been less selfish,” she said.

“Where you are concerned, Honora, I have but one desire,” he answered, “and that is to see you happy—in the best sense of the term. If I could induce you to go back and give your husband another trial, I should return with a lighter heart. You ask me whether I think you have been selfish. I answer frankly that I think you have. I don't pretend to say your husband has not been selfish also. Neither of you have ever tried, apparently, to make your marriage a success. It can't be done without an honest effort. You have abandoned the most serious and sacred enterprise in the world as lightly as though it had been a piece of embroidery. All that I can gather from your remarks is that you have left your husband because you have grown tired of him.”

“Yes,” said Honora, “and you can never realize how tired, unless you knew him as I did. When love dies, it turns into hate.”

He rose, and walked to the other end of the room, and turned.

“Could you be induced,” he said, “for the sake of your aunt and uncle, if not for your own, to consider a legal separation?”

For an instant she stared at him hopelessly, and then she buried her face in her hands.

“No,” she cried. “No, I couldn't. You don't know what you ask.”

He went to her, and laid his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“I think I do,” he said.

There was a moment's tense silence, and then she got to her feet and looked at him proudly.

“Yes,” she cried, “it is true. And I am not ashamed of it. I have discovered what love is, and what life is, and I am going to take them while I can.”

She saw the blood slowly leave his face, and his hands tighten. It was not until then that she guessed at the depth of his wound, and knew that it was unhealed. For him had been reserved this supreme irony, that he should come here to plead for her husband and learn from her own lips that she loved another man. She was suddenly filled with awe, though he turned away from her that she might not see his face: And she sought in vain for words. She touched his hand, fearfully, and now it was he who trembled.

“Peter,” she exclaimed, “why do you bother with me? I—I am what I am. I can't help it. I was made so. I cannot tell you that I am sorry for what I have done—for what I am going to do. I will not lie to you—and you forced me to speak. I know that you don't understand, and that I caused you pain, and that I shall cause—them pain. It may be selfishness—I don't know. God alone knows. Whatever it is, it is stronger than I. It is what I am. Though I were to be thrown into eternal fire I would not renounce it.”

She looked at him again, and her breath caught. While she had been speaking, he had changed. There was a fire in his eyes she had never seen before, in all the years she had known him.

“Honora,” he said quietly, “the man who has done this is a scoundrel.”

She stared at him, doubting her senses, her pupils wide with terror.

“How dare you, Peter! How dare you!” she cried.

“I dare to speak the truth,” he said, and crossed the room to where his hat was lying and picked it up. She watched him as in a trance. Then he came back to her.

“Some day, perhaps, you will forgive me for saying that, Honora. I hope that day will come, although I shall never regret having said it. I have caused you pain. Sometimes, it seems, pain is unavoidable. I hope you will remember that, with the exception of your aunt and uncle, you have no better friend than I. Nothing can alter that friendship, wherever you go, whatever you do. Goodby.”

He caught her hand, held it for a moment in his own, and the door had closed before she realized that he had gone. For a few moments she stood motionless where he had left her, and then she went slowly up the stairs to her own room....