"Just let me go, Albert—quietly."
"Where?"
She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.
"I've thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since—this. I'll go quietly; I'll take the blame. In these cases where a woman leaves it becomes desertion—"
"If you're talking divorce, I'll see you burn like brimstone before I'll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your damn whims."
She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.
"I know, Albert, to you it sounds—worse, probably, than it is. But think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here—in your house—hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go, Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"
He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.
"You won't ruin my name—you won't ruin my name."
"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of desertion—"