“What do you expect me to do?” She shuddered and closed her eyes.
“Well, I thought—perhaps—” He found it a difficult thing to say in spite of himself, “couldn’t we—er—come to some agreement, say, whereby you would consent to a—a divorce?”
“A—a divorce—Oh—no—no—I don’t believe in divorce!” Marjorie Benton’s voice rose hysterically. But her husband was not to be swayed from his purpose.
“But surely, Marjorie,” he reasoned, “you wouldn’t care to continue living under the same roof with me—knowing that I love—another woman?”
“Have you thought of the children, at all?” She grasped at the suggestion of the dreadful scandal this thing would be bound to create, knowing as she did, Hugh’s horror of anything of the sort.
Parrot-like, Hugh Benton repeated the exact words of Geraldine DeLacy as she had expounded her philosophy of life to him, but had anyone told him that he was so swayed into unconscious repetition, he would have denied it with indignation. Hugh Benton was fond of declaring he was a man with a mind of his own. So, at the reference to his children, he turned and told her with calm dignity:
“For once in my life I am thinking only of myself and my own happiness, Marjorie. Up to now I have always considered others, but I can’t see that it has brought me very much.”
“And yet I can remember you telling me,” she hastened to remind him, “that the only real happiness in life could be derived through helping others.”
“If I said that, it must have been a great many years ago—before I became disillusioned.” The retort was bitter.
Marjorie Benton rose and herself stooped to pick up the shredded handkerchief she had dropped. There was a hauteur in her manner that conveyed her belief that humiliation had gone far enough. She must put an end to the scene before her tautened nerves snapped and she became a driveling suppliant at the feet of the husband who was so cruelly telling her he had done with her—that he loved another.