“Dominick’s not so dead in love with me,” continued Berny, with her eyes following the parasol tip. “He could manage to bear his life without me. He—” she paused, and then said, enraged to hear that her voice was husky—“doesn’t care a button whether I live or die.”
The pause that greeted this statement was entirely different from its predecessors. There was amazement in it, and there was pain. Neither listener could for a moment speak; then Hannah said with a solemnity full of dignity,
“I can’t believe that, Berny.”
“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” returned Berny, still not looking up. “If you like to keep on believing lies, it’s all the same to me. But I guess I know more about Dominick Ryan, and what he feels, than you do, and I tell you he doesn’t care a hang for me. He gave up caring”—she paused, a memory of the ball, the quarrel, and the fatal visit to Antelope flashing through her mind—“over a year ago. I guess,” she raised her head and looked coolly at her sisters, “he won’t lay awake nights at the thought of losing me.”
They looked at her without speaking, their faces curiously different in expression from what they had been after her first confessions. All excitement had gone from them. They looked more wounded and hurt than she did. They were women, dashed and mortified, by a piece of news that had abashed them in its admitted failure and humiliation of another woman.
“I—I—can’t believe it,” faltered Hannah. “Dominick’s always so kind, so attentive, so——”
She came to a stop, checked by an illuminating memory of the Sundays on which Dominick now never came to dinner, of his absence from their excursions to the park, of his mysterious mid-winter holiday to the Sierra.
“Have you had a row?” said Hazel. “Everybody has them some time and then you make up again, and it’s just the same as it was before. Fighting with your husband’s different from other fighting. It doesn’t matter much, or last.”
Berny looked down at the parasol tip. Her lips suddenly began to quiver, and tears, the rare burning tears of her kind, pricked into her eyes.
“We haven’t lived together for over eight months,” she said.