“Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more, naturally. Who couldn’t?”
“More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange to-night.”
“I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s all right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m blaming no one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, and I must make you see.”
“If a thing’s there, I can see it.”
“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for it that isn’t plain.”
“What’s there?”
“The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.”
“Failure! But we are married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, there could be no failure.
“We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried.