The clear white light was gone. It was unclear and confused, filled with sudden, new needs and readjustments. Roger could not go on sending her so much of his salary. Nor did she wish to be dependent on him. If she gave nothing, she would take nothing for herself.
She would go back to work. She would have to sell her brain and obedience again to the highest bidder, give of her best, suit her hours to the order of another, give to the limit of her power, always conscious of others waiting to snatch this privilege from her. Outwardly her life would be the life before she met Roger. Inwardly it could never be that again. Rogie made it impossible. Neither girl nor wife, Anne faced the years. Only motherhood was left.
Hour after hour, Anne sat, tense and still, staring out across the garden, moving only to the need of Rogie. Unsuspected threads crossed and tangled her clearest purposes. She would go back again into the prison cell of some law office. She would begin again the deadening round that had once so disturbed Roger. Now it would not disturb him. From depths within, anger rose at the world, at life, at Roger. Into the pit of his belief he could throw all his own energy and hope, even the first loneliness,—if he felt any,—for past material comfort and little Rogie. She had no such pit. She would walk through the days, physically weary, empty of purpose except for Rogie. And he was so little, his demands for food and sleep and cleanliness, any kind woman could meet.
Anne sat until dawn, the darkness within as dense as the night without. Not until the first faint streaks of silver broke in the east did Anne see the thread of a path before her. She could not move on blindly into the future—a future like Hilda's Niche. To the limit of her power, she would straighten it, begin her new life with no thread running to the past. She would get a legal divorce, stipulate a small amount for Rogie's maintenance and fixed times and ways for Roger to see him.
Late that morning Anne went to a lawyer. As she moved across the outer office to the door marked private it gave her an extraordinary feeling of being two people, in two different spots at the same time—Anne Mitchell, private secretary, going to take dictation, and Anne Barton, wife of Roger Barton, mother of Roger Mitchell Barton, going to seek a divorce.
The lawyer Anne had selected because she had once written him a letter in a case John Lowell was handling, was an elderly man with sagging cheeks, passion-weary eyes, and a fastidious nicety of dress. Within the casque of his manner and clothes, the soul of man was rotted. His surprise at Anne's blond youth flashed for a second in his eyes, and then with lowered head, he listened with professional interest while she stated her wish briefly. When she had finished he looked up.
"Ah—incompatible, you say, quite incompatible. A great pity. Are you sure you've given the matter every possible consideration, Mrs. Barton?"
"Every possible consideration," Anne said sharply.
"Incompatible," he repeated, and his eyes stripped from the word every meaning but the connotation of physical repulsion. Anne's hands clenched and she wanted to run. But where? The world would give this same interpretation; under all the large vague terms with which people might cover them, this would be their thought. She turned her eyes quickly from the eyes moving with pretense of deep consideration over her flaming face and neck and body.
"Suppose you don't do anything definite for a time, Mrs. Barton. Nearly all young couples—ah—after the first two or three years—reach this point. It seems as if the first passion almost invariably runs its course in that time then—after a period of physical indifference—aversion often—if you have intellectual interests——"