Lili might consistently have had a totally different story, but she couldn’t possibly have a story that wasn’t reminiscent of thousands and thousands of other stories, not Lili. There was nothing very definite about it. She seemed always like some wayward, brazen child, with no faculty for doing justice to the serious facts of life. One could not listen without laughter, even though silent; nor could one listen quite without the sudden tightening of tears.
Jerome’s gaze never left her face, and she seemed glad of his sincere, almost passionate attention. It might be nothing could alter her present plight, but there was refreshment, like the long refreshment of an utterly spent emotion, in baring her heart completely to some one of whose comradely sympathy she was sure.
When she had told Jerome the whole story, she sat with her hands in her lap, leaning forward a little in a limp way.
“If it hadn’t been for this, Jerry, I’d have married you long ago. But I couldn’t bear to tell you about it—I haven’t told anybody at all, because I’ve wanted to be free. I’ve even tried to kid myself into forgetting. Sometimes it all seems so long ago. I nearly did tell you once, Jerry—that first night we sat out on the schooner and you were so sweet to me. But I couldn’t seem to, and after that every time it got harder. I used to think: maybe a letter will come saying he’s dead! It’s awful queer how far you can kid yourself. The day you made love to me so hard behind the scenes in Honolulu I almost told myself I’d just decide he’d gotten a divorce from me long ago, and go ahead and marry you, Jerry. But then I happened to remember about some people I used to know who were arrested for bigamy, and I got cold feet.”
Jerome sat staring. Here were shallows and depths he had not glimpsed before. He shuddered a little at the thought of the thin ice on which he had been plunging in pursuit of his unhappy little romance. The word bigamy, which fell so lightly from her lips, sent a vague shiver through him. It was as though, suddenly and for the first time, he realized that he and Lili moved on different planes....
He seemed dazed. “It doesn’t seem possible to think of you married, Lili!” Then, as though stimulated by the very sense of chaos which was just then so strong in his heart, Jerome asked her: “Why can’t you get a divorce from him?”
“Can’t be done,” she returned listlessly. But she began eyeing Jerome just a little shrewdly.
“Why not?”
“Well,” she rambled, rubbing her hands together in a dreamy, irrational way, “I sometimes thought I’d find out how I could get one, but I never seemed to have time, and I’ve always heard it’s not so easy. I don’t know. I never knew how anybody went to work to get a divorce. And then,” she continued with a far-away look in her wide eyes, “you see I don’t know where he is, for another thing. Don’t you have to produce the evidence in a case like that? I don’t know how it is in divorces. We lived most of the time in two or three boarding houses in Chicago. I don’t know where he came from. We just met.”
Jerome looked across at her forlornly. The shabby pathos of her wretched little past gave him a feeling of stuffiness and depression. He seemed to see before him a quite new and more than ever perplexing Lili—felt himself almost a stranger in her life.