“It’s not a question of forgiving. I don’t see it that way. She’s free to do as she pleases. It’s simply that now I know she’s not capable of loyalty.”
“Alfred, I give you my word there’s been nothing wrong—”
“Oh, I believe it! She’s respectable!” he said, bitterly. “I’m not afraid of her being too generous with—anyone. She’ll be like some of those singers and geniuses I’ve read of. She’ll have half a dozen husbands, but she’ll never do anything wrong.”
“That’s very cruel and unjust! Surely you’ve seen enough of the world to understand these—infatuations.... He’s a very handsome and attractive man, and she has lost her head. That’s all it is! It won’t last!”
“I know it won’t. But it will happen again. It isn’t the infatuation that hits me so hard. I can understand that. It could happen to almost anyone. But it’s the—the rank, beastly cruelty of it! To walk off and leave me without a word. I—you don’t know—leaving all her little things there—all her little things—telling me all the time she’d come back in a few days.... It’s....”
He got up and walked over to the fire.
“No,” he said. “She can have her divorce. I always told her I’d never try to keep her against her will. But—I wish to God we’d never got married.... If we could only part now with some sort of decency ... if she could just say, ‘It’s over. Good-by!’ But now—I guess you don’t realize—I’ll have to be caught in a compromising situation—all the dirty, filthy business will have to be written down and talked about by a lot of lawyers.... The sort of thing I hate worse than death. It’s what they call acting honourably for me to do that.”
“Don’t do it, Alfred! Don’t do it, I beg you! I am sure she loves you!”
“She has a damn peculiar way of loving, then.”
“I know she has. There are horrible things in her nature. But I am sure that you know the good in her too. She is honest and—”