"What sort of reasons?" he urged.
"Oh, I don't know," she said again, pensively, dropping a lump of sugar into his coffee-cup. She added, while passing the cup to him: "It isn't so easy for a woman to be—to be drifting about—especially with two children."
"But why should you have drifted about, when you knew that at a sign from you—?"
She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "And when I saw you had dismantled the house and other people were living in it—I couldn't help seeing that, you know, in driving by—"
"But, good God, Edith, you wouldn't have come back to me?"
She stirred her own coffee slowly. "N-no."
"Does that mean no or yes?"
"Oh, it means no. That is"—she reflected long—"if I had gone back to you I should have been sorry."
"You would have considered it a weakness—a surrender—"
She nodded. "Something like that."