Nona sat silent, instinctively turning her eyes from his troubled face. "Why should you be jealous?" she asked at length.
He shifted his position, stretched his arms along his knees, and brought his eyes down to a level with hers. There was something pathetic, she thought, in such youthful blueness blurred with uncomprehended pain.
"I suppose it's never got much to do with reasons," he said, very low.
"No; that's why it's so silly—and ungenerous."
"It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't care a hang if I'm jealous or if I'm not. She doesn't care anything about me. I've simply ceased to exist for her."
"Well, then you can't be in her way."
"It seems I am, though. Because I do exist, for the world; and as the boy's father. And the mere idea gets on her nerves."
Nona laughed a little bitterly. "She wants a good deal of elbow-room, doesn't she? And how does she propose to eliminate you?"
"Oh, that's easy. Divorce."
There was a silence between the two. This was how it sounded—that simple reasonable request—on the lips of the other partner, the partner who still had a stake in the affair! Lately she seemed to have forgotten that side of the question; but how hideously it grimaced at her now, behind the lines of this boyish face wrung with a man's misery!