“No divorce?”
“I thought Sid had got a divorce. That was the meanest trick he played on me. I told him I wanted to be free. He said that it would be better to wait for a year and get a divorce on the ground of desertion. He didn’t want to have a lot of allegations of cruelty in the record. He said it would hurt his career.
“We started out to wait for that year to elapse. It was a big year for Sidney. He came a long way up for about seven or eight months of that year, and then he went all the way down in three months. I don’t know all that happened, but his manager came to the conclusion he was yellow. He’d been a terror in the ring with the men he could master, but — oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story, and I think he did some crooked work — sold out his manager and threw a fight or something. I don’t know enough of what happened to talk about it. I just heard rumors, but, anyway, about ten months from the date of our separation, he came to me. He was desperate then. He said that he’d never been able to get a grip on himself after I’d left. He said I’d taken the inspiration out of his life.”
“That was after ten months?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was bitter. “All the time he was going up, he was very patronizing toward me; but when the bottom fell out, he started begging for sympathy. Well, anyway, he told me that he was the sort of man who needed some woman to be his inspiration, that he knew he could never get me to come back, that he had met another girl, that he could never feel toward her as he felt toward me, but that she was desperately in love with him, and he sort of liked her.” She laughed bitterly. “That was Sidney all over. She loved him desperately, and he sort of liked her.”
“And what did he want?” I asked.
“He wanted to go to Reno and get a divorce.”
“And suggested that you pay for it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”