"For a time you were a good imitation."
"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things would change, that they were so bad they must change—and they wouldn't."
"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper lip.
"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't you remember, at the very start, how I said I wanted to be honest? But somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened, seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie, and so all we did was lies and lies."
"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."
"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to give—not what I gave you—not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you always knew that you had all you wanted. Well, you had. But did you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let myself be married to a man three times my age—and this is Nature's punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger, and because I was hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"—she flashed it out at him—"what happened to me while you were selling the mine was not an accident!"
This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger and horror struggled for him.
"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean——"
"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go crazy—crazy! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother against my will!"
He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked: