“What?” he said.
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter,” he answered in an aggrieved tone that altogether belied his words.
“But there is,” she insisted, quite in the old way. “You are blue.”
He was silent a moment longer, in an ugly reluctance to speak, and then,
“Well,” he said, savagely, “debts, if you want to know.”
She sighed. The old sordid struggle after all! He waited awhile longer, desiring her to coax him out of his mood, but she said nothing, and at last he was impelled to speak once more himself.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” he said, “my creditors, now that I’ve been beaten, are making my office a rendezvous.”
He spoke bitterly, as debtors do. He had leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, and he looked more gloomily than ever out of the window. The light was just sufficient to mark the outlines of his really fine head, while the shadows of evening softened the lines in his face, the harsh, unpleasant lines that a few years had drawn there. She studied his profile, her eye caressing his curls, the curls she remembered so well—remembered, because she had a troubled sense of thinking now of Jerome as in the past. She gazed until the changes wrought by the short years of their common life passed away, and she saw again the Jerome of old—her own, her lost ideal.... If he had only gone down in some glorious conflict, through some mighty sacrifice, some great devotion to principle! Why had he failed? Had she not tried to do all that a wife could to help and guide him? If he had married some other woman, some woman of courser fiber, who would not have tried to keep him continually up to such high ideals? She paused, some sudden shock smote her, she felt her face grow cold and pale. Another woman married to Jerome Garwood! She caught her breath, her face burned as the blood rushed back to her cheeks again, and then suddenly, impulsively, she spoke, as much to herself, it seemed, as to her husband:
“I do love you still, Jerome!”