"Mine," she admitted. "You know how I came to make it—the narrowness of my life that yet seemed so broad, the insignificance of the artificial men I knew, the longing for romance, for a love affair with a flavour of risk and adventure in it. You must n't hold me now to that girl's dream, since you were the one that waked me from it. You showed me first that we really did n't care for each other. If you loved me, why did you take up with the first pretty servant-girl you met?"
She had not meant to recall their difference in class, but in Lena's station in life lay the chief sting of his offence, and the fact could not be concealed.
"Why? Why?" he echoed. "Because she loved me more than you did,—if you ever loved me at all,—because you starved my heart and made me feel that you were not my wife at all, but only a patroness who had taken me up to make something of me, with an indefinite promise of a reward at the end of it, if I would be a good little boy and do as you told me, and keep out of mischief, and win a prize. What kind of a position is that to put a man in?"
"I supposed the reward was worth working and waiting for," she retorted coolly. "You 're whipping yourself into a passion now, Tom, but you know in your heart that my cruelty to you, if it was cruelty, was not as great as your cruelty to Lena. I would have kept my promise, and you know it, if you had not yourself forfeited all claim to my respect. I supposed you were a strong man"—
"And have I no wrongs?" he broke in. "Did you think I was n't a man at all, but just a lump of putty to be moulded by your hands? How do you suppose I felt when we were married in New York, and you left me at the very door of the church?"
"I did n't realise till then what I had done," she gasped, the panic of that moment returning to her, "and I had to leave you."
"But I did realise it," he cried bitterly, "as any man would have realised it. I realised nothing else. I walked the streets, wondering whether it was a practical joke. You made a fool of me. You did n't tell me beforehand that you were going to play such a trick on me."
"Trick!"
"Yes, trick! What else, in the name of God, was it? It seemed like nothing else, at first. I could hardly remember what you said,—you spoke so confused and were so anxious to get away,—but finally I figured it out that you were just scared, and that I would have to wait a little while for you to get used to the idea that you were my wife." He paused, choked by emotion. "I waited, God knows," he went on, "waited for nearly three years. And what did I get? A few stolen meetings and a few kisses, not very genuine ones at that. Somehow you carried the thing out in your father's high-handed way. I could n't break through and get at you. Every time we met I thought I would, but instead I took advice and promises, until it became a habit of mind. I became tired of the mockery, and heart-sick. You made yourself seem less and less my wife. And when I did n't see you for weeks at a time, and when I was filled with resentment, I met Lena"—
"And did the very thing that lost me to you forever," she supplemented relentlessly.