“Jerome,” she said presently, in a voice it was obviously a little difficult still to control, “you haven’t told me anything about your wife.”
He made an indefinite sound with his lips, and a look half of amusement, half of grimness, yet also somewhat of a gentler sadness, came into his eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he admitted.
“Are you happy, Jerome?”
“Now? Oh, yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Where? Oh, off on the high seas somewhere. The fact is,” he continued more bluffly, “we’ve separated, Stella. It wasn’t a success. We bored each other. As Captain Utterbourne would say, these experiments require a sort of real genius if they’re not to turn out failures. I believe,” he added with a sparkle, “the Captain speaks from experience.”
Stella looked at him, then her eyes faltered. There was an immense confusion in her heart. All at once she, too, remembered how she had scolded him so bitterly that afternoon in the fog. “If I were a man,” she had cried with high, impatient scorn, “I think I’d discover something besides being a clerk in a dingy old ship supply store!” And now he had discovered something besides that. He had discovered another destiny altogether, and she could play no part in it.
She contemplated, as they sat together on the moonlit temple floor, the tangle into which their lives had drifted.