"Complaisant? It's callousness; don't-careness. You mean me to understand, then, that you've reckoned with everything?"
"No, I don't. I mean you to understand that I don't trouble to do any reckoning about you at all."
As she uttered the words she was conscious of the brutality of them; but she was speaking truth, representing those feelings which had taken the place of love-emotions in her heart; and what else was there to say?
"I must say," he said, "you're candid."
"I want to be. If we once thoroughly understood each other we'd shake down better and go our ways in peace. I don't want formal separation, for the children's sake."
"Formal separation? If we had that, because you refused to live with me, desertion would be constituted and I'd get the children, you know."
"I wonder," she said, starting. "I should fight."
He saw the set meditation on her face under the moonlight.
"Would there be nothing I could say?" she asked, lifting her eyes to his. "I wonder if there'd be no countercharge ingenuity could bring?"
She did not mean what occurred to him; the things in her mind were of too untechnical a nature to find a hearing in the divorce courts; but as she asked her question suddenly his heart seemed to rock and to stand still for a space, while he shifted his eyes rapidly from hers and gazed straight out over the steering-wheel, down the hill, into the blue-white moonlit distance.