He fell to striking the lump of clay again, and Rose said, as if offering the remark with a sort of tentative timidity,
“You said just now you had nothing to complain of against her. It doesn’t seem fair to leave a woman—a wife—just because she’s hard to live with and you no longer like her.”
“Would you,” he said with a manner so full of irritated disagreement as to be almost hectoring, “advocate two people living on together in a semblance of friendship, who are entirely uncongenial, rub each other the wrong way so that the sight of one is unpleasant to the other?”
“Are you sure that’s the way she feels about you?”
He again looked away from her, and answered in a sullen tone, as though against his will,
“I don’t know.”
They were silent for a space, and he went on.
“Doesn’t it strike you as wrong, cowardly, mean, for a man and woman to tear their lives to pieces out of respect for what the world says and thinks? Every semblance of love and mutual interest has gone from our companionship. Isn’t it all wrong that we should make ourselves miserable to preserve the outward forms of it? We’re just lying to the world because we haven’t got the sand to tell the truth. You ask me if my views on this matter are hers. I don’t know, that’s the truth.” A memory of Berny’s futile and pathetic efforts to make friends with him on his return swept over him and forced him to say, “Honestly, I don’t think she wants to leave me. I think the situation doesn’t drive her crazy the way it does me. I think she doesn’t mind it. I don’t know why, but she doesn’t seem to. But surely, any woman living would rather be free of a man she no longer cared for, than forced to live on in a false relation with him, one irritating the other, the two of them every day growing more antagonistic.”
“She would not want to be free if she loved him.”
“Loved him!” he ejaculated, with angry scorn. “She never loved me or anybody else. Love is not in her. Oh, you don’t know! I thought last night I’d offer her all I had, the flat, the furniture, my salary, everything I could rake and scrape together, and then I’d tell her I was going to leave her, that I couldn’t stand living that way any longer. I was going to take a room somewhere and give her everything I could. I was going to be as generous to her as I knew how. I’d not say one word against her to anybody. That was what I thought I’d do last night.”