"That was a sorry spectacle I made of myself last night. Can you beat that for degradation—a man who has made a damnable failure of marriage, skulking at his wife's heels to snap and snarl at any decent man who is civil to her?"
"Don't talk so bitterly——"
"I'm indulging in a luxury, Cleland—the luxury of truth, of honesty, of straight thinking.... I've been bragging about it, celebrating it, extolling it for years. But I never did any until last night."
"You're rubbing it in pretty hard, Harry. A man is bound to make mistakes——"
"I'm the mistake! I realize it, now—as Verne realized it. That's why he did what he did. You don't, if you are right.... I never supposed I could behave as rottenly as I did last night. But it's been a long strain.... You heard that rotten outbreak of mine concerning women—the night we heard what Verne had done? Well, the strain was showing.... It broke me last night...."
He lifted his head and looked intently at Cleland:
"It was the shock of seeing her in a public place with another man. I had never seen her with any other man. It's nearly three years, now, since I made a damned ass of myself, and she very quietly went her way leaving me to go mine.... And in all that time, Cleland, there has not been a breath of suspicion against her. She has been in the lighter and more frivolous shows almost continuously; but she has lived as straight a life as any woman ever lived.... And I know it.... And I knew it—cur that I was—when I spoke to her as I did, and turned on you like a rotter——"
He extended his hand and took hold of the iced glass, but let it rest there.
"I've lied and lied and lied," he said, "to myself about myself; to others about my estimate of women.... I'm just a four-flusher, Cleland. The best of 'em are better than our stars. The remainder average as well as we do.... Verne got what was coming to him.... And so have I, Cleland—so have I——"
"Wait a moment——"