"And when did you make that interesting discovery?" inquired she, still apparently giving her hat her attention.
"When I saw how I felt toward Raphael. You think I am jealous of him. But it is not jealousy. I know you couldn't fall in love with a fellow that rigs himself out like a peacock."
The delicate line of Neva's eyebrows lifted. "Boris dresses to suit himself," said she. "I never think of it—nor, I fancy, does he."
"Besides," continued Armstrong, "you could no more fall in love with him than you could at any other place step over the line between a nice woman and the other kind."
"Really!"
"Yes—really!" he retorted, showing as much anger as he dared. "My feeling about Raphael is that he has no right to hang about another man's wife as he does. And you feel the same way."
With graceful, sure fingers she was arranging her hair where it had been pressed down by her hat. "That is amusing," she said tranquilly. "You must either change your idea of what 'nice woman' means or change your idea of me. I haven't the slightest sense of having been married to you."
"Impossible!" he maintained.
"I know why you say that—why men think that. But I assure you, my friend, I have no more the feeling that I am married than that I am still sick because I had a severe illness once."
His mind had been much occupied by memories of their married days; their dead child so long, so completely forgotten by him and never thought of as a tie between him and his wife, had suddenly become a thing of vividness, the solemn and eternal sealing of its mother to him. Her calm repudiation of him and his rights now seemed to him as unwomanly as would have seemed any attempt on her part to claim him, had he not begun to care for her.