"He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very happy. Didn't you know that?"
Choate was glad and sorry.
"Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!"
"No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and of course we're really strangers now."
The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here—that Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on—and said to her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't true."
"So you see," said the real Esther to Choate, "I can't do anything. I sit here alone with my hands tied, and grandma upstairs—of course I can't leave grandma—and I can't do anything. Do you think—" she looked very challenging and pure—"do you think it would be wicked of me to dream of a divorce?"
Choate got up and walked to the fireplace. He put both hands on the mantel and gripped it, and Esther, with that sense of implacable mastery women feel at moments of sexual triumph, saw the knuckles whiten.
"Wouldn't it be better," she said, "for him? I don't care for myself, though I'm very lonely, very much at sea; but it does seem to me it would be better for him if he could be free and build his life up again from the beginning."
Choate answered in a choked voice that made him shake his head impatiently:
"It isn't better for any man to be free."