“Yes,” her voice broke, “a great deal. But I shouldn’t advise you to hold me to it.”
“You never loved me,” Wilbur wandered back to the vital point. “You took me because you were bored or because you couldn’t marry Erard, or something of the sort.”
“That is a lie,” Mrs. Wilbur answered composedly. “If I had known then that on such provocation you would make such low guesses—I should not have married you.” She remembered the scene in the Paris salon, the solemnity of it, and a wave of compassion for him and for herself overcame her. “Don’t kill it all, John! Let us part with some respect and honour for one another, not like a man and his mistress.”
“Go!” Wilbur exclaimed, excited by the impalpability of the reasons for this absurd and unexpected wrong he was made to suffer. “Go! and don’t think I shall follow you and beg you to come back. No, if you crawl here along the boulevard, and pray to be forgiven, I will shut the door on you and curse you.”
Mrs. Wilbur opened her lips, then checked herself. “Good-by, John. I am sorry, so sorry you cannot understand.”
Wilbur laughed sneeringly. “But your sense of duty is so keen!”
“I must, must,” she broke into tears. “I am suffocating here. I may be all wrong. I shall suffer for it!”
“I hope so.” He watched her leave the room and grasp the handrail of the stairs to support herself. An old, savage instinct surged up in him, the desire to kill what you could not keep in any other way. That she should calmly decide to walk out of his life after three years of marriage, for no provocation that any reasonable man would consider for a moment,—that was intolerable! And society merely enfeebled the men who had to stand, as he stood, passive. He would like to feel his arms about her, his hand at her throat, and to have her know that for hate as well as for love, she was his for ever.
But she walked out of his life.