"I mean free from marriage," explained she gently, "free to make my own life."
He reflected, looked at her, reflected again. She saw, as plainly as if his thoughts were print before her eyes, that he had decided she was a spoiled child in a pet, that he was trying to find some kindly, effective way of humoring her. But to take her words seriously, to meet her on a plane of equality—the idea had not occurred to the grandson of Achilles Vaughan, and could not occur to him. Anger boiled up in her, evaporated. She laughed.
He glanced at her quickly. "Oh, you were joking!" said he in a relieved tone.
"That wasn't why I laughed. It was to save myself from doing something ridiculous—shouting out, or upsetting the table, or running amuck."
"No matter. It's clear to me that you're not yourself this evening—not at all."
"Richard," said she slowly, "I know it's hard for you to believe a woman's not a fool. I don't expect you to credit me with intelligence. Perhaps you might if I were a big, fat woman with a loud voice. But I'm not. So, assume I'm as silly a fool as—as most women pretend to be, to catch husbands and to use them after they're caught. But please assume also that, whatever I am or am not, I want my freedom. And try to realize that we women are living in the twentieth century as well as you men—and not in the tenth or fifteenth."
His expression was serious and respectful; he was not one to fail in polite consideration for the feminine—the wayward, capricious, irrational feminine with which stronger and rational man should ever be patient and gentle. But she saw that he was in reality about as much impressed as he would have been by a demand for the open cage door from a canary born and bred to captivity and helplessness. He came round the table, put his hands tenderly on her shoulders, pressed his lips in a husbandly caress upon the coil of auburn hair that crowned her small head. "You're tired and nervous to-night, dear," said he with grave kindness. "So we'll not talk about it any more. Go to bed, and get a good night's sleep. Then——"
She rose, found herself at a disadvantage standing before one so much taller, sat down in another chair. "Yes, I am tired and I am nervous. But I'm also in earnest. Why, if we weren't strangers, you'd realize. You'd have felt it long ago. Can't you see I'm nothing to you or you to me that is, nothing especial—nothing that ought to satisfy either of us?" She was trying to speak with serious calmness; the very effort overstrained her. And his face—its expression was so hopeless! She was speaking a language he did not understand, was speaking of matters of which he had not the faintest glimmer of knowledge. Her voice broke; she steadied it. It broke again. She began to sob. "This life of ours is a degradation. It's like a stagnant pool—it's death in life. I can't stand it. I want love—want to give love and get it! My whole being cries out for love! I'm dying here of the empty heart. I must go. I ask you to be just—to give me my right—my freedom——"
It was his expression that stopped her. He was not listening to her words at all. He was simply waiting for her to talk out her hysteria, as he thought it, so that he could begin to soothe the agitated child. She threw out her arms in despair.
"Go on, dear," he urged. "Say all you want. You'll feel better for it."