MacDonald turned from him contemptuously and faced his wife, who averted her head.
“Look at me, Julie!” he cried, appealingly. “I am better worth it than he is. Good Lord! I don’t see what you see in him. He’s so tame! Let him go about his business. He’s nobody. He don’t want you. Come along with me and we’ll lead a life! You shall cut a dash out there. I can make money hand over fist. It’s the place for you. Come on!”
For a moment Julie’s eyes glittered. The words allured her, but her old gods prevailed. She threw out her arms as if to ward off his proposal.
“No, no,” she said, shrilly. “I cannot make it seem right. You were dead to me, and I married him. One does not go back to the dead. If I am your wife, what am I to him? It puts me in the wrong these two years. I cannot have it so, I tell you. I cannot have it so!”
Applegate felt faint and sick. Rising, he groped for the door. “I must have air,” he said to Hopson, confusedly. “I will come back in a minute.”
Once outside, the cool November night refreshed him. He dropped down upon the doorstep and threw back his head, drinking in long breaths as he looked up at the mocking stars.
When he found at last the courage to ask himself what he was going to do, the answer was not ready. The decision lay entirely in his hands. He might still be free if he said the word; and as he thought of this he trembled. He had always tried to be what his neighbors called a straight man, and he wanted to be straight in this also. But where, in such a hideous tangle, was the real morality to be found? Surely not in acceding to Julie’s demands! What claim had she upon the home whose simple traditions of peace and happiness she had trampled rudely under foot? Was it not a poor, cheap convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord God Himself could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He deals with the souls of men.
It seemed to him that he had decided, but as he rose and turned to the door a new thought stabbed him so sharply that he dropped his lifted hand with a groan.
Where had been that sense of duty to his children, just now so imperative, in the days when he had yielded to Julie’s charm against his better judgment? Had duty ever prevailed against inclination with him? Was it prevailing now?
High over all the turmoil and desperation of his thoughts shone out a fresh perception that mocked him as the winter stars had mocked. For that hour at least, the crucial one of his decision, he felt assured that in the relation of man and woman to each other lies the supreme ethical test of each, and in that relation there is no room for selfishness. It might be, indeed, that he owed Julie nothing, but might it not also be that the consideration he owed all womankind could only be paid through this woman he had called his wife? This was an ideal with which he had never had to reckon.