"Marie, what do you mean?"
"I told him to make his own life. I'm not a dog-in-the-manger woman, anyway. What I don't want I'll give away freely."
"What can you mean?"
"I've given him away." The knowledge that had come upon her in the car that Saturday afternoon made her voice grim. "He's gone elsewhere," she said; "I feel it; I know it. A wife can sense these things as a barometer senses rain."
"Oh, Marie!" Julia whispered, and for a while there was silence in the room, broken only by the chuckles of the baby-girl. Both women looked down, at the sound, upon the fluffy head and Julia asked, still in a bated whisper:
"What do you think you'll do?"
"Nothing," said Marie, "above all, nothing. The children will keep us under the same roof. We shall be like thousands of other married people, privately free; publicly tied up tight together in the same dear old knot."
Her brief laugh trembled.
"Marie, you know you think it is a dear old knot."
Marie did not reply. After awhile she said: