"No," Helen said. "Not our defiance; our confession of a craven fear. I am afraid of death. I don't dare take my life."
"We are talking," responded her companion, in his turn leaving the table and approaching the window, "like a couple of unmitigated ghouls. I acknowledge your right to put aside your life if it bores you; man has at least that one inalienable right. But why should you? Art is left still."
"Art," she repeated with profound sadness; "yes, but a woman is never content with abstractions. She demands something more definite. And, by the way, Will came to see me yesterday."
"Yes! What did he want?"
"He said he only came to see how I was. I think he recognizes that now he has come from Europe our secret is sure to leak out soon, and is looking the ground over to see how it is best to behave. He was very entertaining; I never enjoyed him more thoroughly."
"He's a model husband," Fenton observed thoughtfully. "As well as you like each other, I'll be hanged if I can see why you don't live like other people."
"It is precisely because we don't live like other people," was the reply, "that we do like each other so well. We are the best of friends; we were the worst possible husband and wife. I hated him officially, and—-There! Why must you bring all that up again? Let the dead past bury its dead."
"But the past won't bury its dead. It sits over their corpses like a persistent resurrectionist, in a fashion which is irresistibly disheartening. Did it never strike you, by the way, what a droll caricature might be made on that line? Time as a decrepit old sexton, you know."
"So few people can joke on those subjects that it would appeal to a very limited audience, I'm afraid."
"Oh, that's true of every thing that is good for any thing."