"He is only telling you the truth," she said calmly, wearily. "I don't care one picayune whether or not you know it, whether or not the world knows it! I'm tired! I'm done with all this sort of thing! Yes, I'm going to marry him as soon as we can get away. As soon as it's decent, if anything's decent any more!"
"And you love him, you'll rob me, you'll leave me—you'll—why, are you all crazy? What are you talking about? When I've given you everything you've got—when you were so much to me! Jennie!"
"No, no!" she raised a hand. "Don't talk about that! It's all over now."
She tore at her throat, at her fingers, heaped up in his hands the gems she wore even then, the gems she had put upon her person to protect them from uncertain servants, gems which left her blazing like some waxen queen in her tomb—white, dead, enjeweled.
"Take them!" she cried. "I don't want them." She went on, piling his hands full of glittering, flashing things. He stood gazing at her, stupefied. Then, slowly, the burden of years, the burden of business failure, and lastly this—the burden of the worst of man's discomfiture, the worst of a man's possible losses—began to weigh down upon him. He shortened visibly; shriveled; drooped.
X
They had no pity for him. Youth has no pity for age, love no pity for a mate's inefficiency; but after all some sort of contempt, at least, seemed due him.
"Rawn," said Halsey, "it's pretty hard. We're all of us paying a hard, heavy price for what we thought we had. But we can't evade it, any part of it. It was your fault that Grace left me. We were going to part. You sent your wife after me, as you call it. I suppose Grace found that out. You know what she did then. I said I blame you, and so I do. But I was going to get a divorce—"
"Divorce!—you divorce my daughter! John Rawn's daughter!"
"Did you not divorce her mother—you, yourself?"