"What you propose is a very grave matter."
Again her secret smile, this time a gleam of irony in it. "You do not wish to be free?"
His expression showed how deeply he instantly became alarmed. She smiled openly. "Don't pretend to yourself that you are concerned about my interests," she said; "frankness to-day—please."
"I'm afraid you don't realize what you are doing," he felt compelled to insist. "And that is honest."
"You don't understand me. You never did. You never could, so long as I am your wife. That's the way it is in marriage—if people begin wrong, as we did. But, at least, believe me when I say I've thought it all out—in these years of long, long days and weeks and months when I've had no business to distract me."
"You are right," he said. "We have never been of the slightest use to each other. We are utterly out of sympathy—like strangers."
"Worse," she replied. "Strangers may come together, but not the husband and wife whose interest in each other has been killed." She gazed long out over the lake toward the mist-veiled Wabash range before adding, almost under her breath, "Or never was born."
"I have a naturally expansive temperament," he went on, as if in her train of thought. "I need friendship, affection. You are by nature reserved and cold."
She smiled enigmatically. "I doubt if you know me well enough to judge."
"At least, you've been cold and reserved with me—always, from the very beginning."