“I don’t understand what you mean,” says the wife.
“That’s neither Luther’s fault nor mine,” answers the husband. “Just as it is not necessarily the husband’s fault if he doesn’t get on with his wife. Possibly he would get on excellently with another woman.”
A dead silence follows; the diners rise from their chairs.
The husband retires to his own room. His wife and her friend leave the dining-room together and sit down in the pavilion.
“What brutality!” exclaims the friend. “How can you, a sensitive, intelligent woman, consent to be the servant of that selfish brute?”
“He has never understood me,” sighs the wife. Her satisfaction in being able to pronounce these damning words is so great, that it drowns the memory of a reply which her husband has given her again and again:
“Do you imagine that your thoughts are so profound that I, a man with a subtle brain, am unable to fathom them? Has it never occurred to you that it may be your shallowness which prevents you from understanding me?”
He sits down in his room, alone. He suffers from remorse, as if he had struck his mother. But she struck the first blow; she has struck him blow after blow, for many years, and never once before has he retaliated.
This coarse, heartless, cynical woman, in whose keeping he confided his whole soul with all its thoughts and emotions, was conscious of his superiority, and therefore she humiliated him, dragged him down, pulled him by the hair, covered him with abuse. Was it a crime that he struck back when she publicly taunted him? Yes—he felt as guilty as if he had murdered his dearest friend.
The twilight of the warm summer night deepens and the moon rises.