For the man, too, had his dumb idea,—the feeling that something precious inside him was being murdered by this pressing struggle to earn more, always more. As man he did not accept the simple theory that men were better off the harder they were pushed, that the male brute needed the spur of necessity to function, that all the man was good for was to be the competent forager. No! Within him there was a protest to the whole spirit of his times,—to the fierce competitive struggle. Something inside him proclaimed that he was not a mere maker of dollars, that life was more than food and lodging, even for those he loved most.
"What do I get out of it?" he added bitterly. "Perhaps I have done too much."
"Oh, if that is the way you feel,—if you don't love me!" Bessie exclaimed with wounded pride. "Probably you are tired of me. When a man is sick of his wife, he finds his family a burden, naturally."
And there they paused at the brink of domestic vulgarity.
Falkner saw the girl on the veranda of the mountain hotel, with her golden hair, her fresh complexion, her allurement. Bessie, most men would think, was even more desirable this minute than then as an unformed girl. The arched eyebrows, so clearly marked, the full lips, the dimpled neck, all spake:—
"Come kiss me, and stop talking like that!"
For a moment the old lure seized the man, the call of the woman who had once been sweet to him. Then his blood turned cold within him. That was the last shame of marriage,—that a wife should throw this lure into the reasoning, a husband to console himself—that way! Falkner rose to his feet.
"I shall make arrangements to sell the house."
"Very well; then I shall take the children and go to my mother in Denver."
"As you please."