I shook my head. “That sounds well, but what does it mean? Next door to nothing, my friend. You and I are not interested in the same things. We’ve nothing to talk about. I don’t know the things you know—the social, the fashionable side of life. You don’t know my side of life—and you couldn’t and wouldn’t learn enough to interest me. Any forced interest you might give would bore me. Pardon my frankness, but this is no time for polite falsehoods. The fact is we’ve outgrown each other. When we look out of our eyes, each of us sees an entirely different world; and neither of us cares about or even believes in the other’s world. We talk, only to irritate. We are absolutely and finally apart. It would be impossible for us to live together.”
She waited until I finished. I doubt if she listened. It was her habit not to listen to what she did not wish to hear. “Godfrey—Godfrey!” she cried, battling with the sobs that rose, perhaps in spite of her. “Do I mean nothing to you—I who have been everything to you? Does the word wife mean nothing to you?”
“You mean nothing to me,” replied I. “And I mean nothing to you. Let us not pretend to deceive ourselves.”
“But you did care about me once,” she pleaded. “I am not old and faded. I still have all the charms I used to have—yes, and more. Isn’t that so, dear?”
“You are more beautiful than you ever were,” said I. “But—you’ve gotten me out of the habit of you. And I couldn’t go back to it if I would.”
She buried her face in her hands and wept.
“At your old tricks,” said I impatiently. “It has always been your way to try to make me seem in the wrong. As a matter of fact, you lost years ago—lost before I did—all interest and taste for our life together. It was you who ended our married life, not I.”
“Yes, it was all my fault,” she sobbed. “Forgive me, dear. Take me back. Don’t cast me off. I’ll be whatever you say—do whatever you wish. Only take me back!”
I could not make an inch of progress toward the real motive behind this obviously sincere plea. As I sat silent, looking at her and puzzling, she began to hope that she had moved me. No—rather, she began to feel stronger in her deep rooted conviction that at bottom I loved her and had never wavered. She came across the room, dropped to her knees beside my chair and hid her face in my lap. Why is it that passion once extinguished can never light again? As she knelt there I appreciated all her physical charms; but I was appreciative with that critical calmness which is the absence of all feeling. I laid my hand on hers.
“Edna,” I said, “what is the meaning of this?”