Again the vision of stalking gossip enraged him. "The world—ha! It always knows everything before the husband suspects anything. I've said that about so many other fools I've known. Now it's my turn. Here we sit at dinner in this ruined home as if everything were all right. Think of it! After what I saw and heard I'm sitting here trying to persuade a pack of flunkeys that you have been a good wife to me!"
"It's hideous, I know, Willie. I'll go away to-morrow. You can divorce me if you want to. I won't resist. It will be horrible to drag your name through the yellow papers. But I won't resist—unless you think you might let our life run along as before until gossip has starved to death? We'll be no worse than the rest, Willie. Every family has its skeleton in the closet. The worst gossips have the worst skeletons. Let's fight it out together, Willie, won't you? Please!"
She stretched one importunate hand across the table to him, but he stared at her with glazed eyes. "And go on like this the rest of our lives? Sitting at table like this every day, facing each other and knowing what we know? Knowing what other people know of us? Keep up the ghastly pretense till we grow old?"
She drew back her rejected hand with a sigh, but pleaded on: "It's not very pretty, that's true; but let's be good sports and play the game. We tried marriage without love, for you knew I didn't really love you, Willie. You knew it and complained of it. But you married me. I tried to do what was right. I ran away from him in France, and I tried to love you and unlove him. But you can't turn your heart like a wheel, you know. We've married and failed. But nearly everybody else has failed one way or another, Willie. Nobody gets what he wants out of life. Let's play the game through. You said to me once—do you remember?—you said, 'Gad, Persis, but you're a good loser.' And I've lost a little, too, Willie. I've had a pretty hard day of it, too. Let's be good losers, Willie; let's try it again, won't you? Won't you, please?"
She sat with hands clasped, and thrust them out to him and prayed to him as if he were an ugly little idol. But contrition did not seem to render her more attractive in his eyes. It hardened his heart against her.
"When I look at you I can only think what you've been to that man; where you've gone, what you've done. You sit there half naked now, ready to go to the opera, to expose your body before the mob—my body—my wife's body. You show it in public—and you dance it in public with anybody—with him! The first time you saw him you were dressed like that, and you danced with him that loathsome tango. You taught him how. And he has taught you how to be his wife—not mine.
"You've set everybody laughing at me. They're all saying I was a blind, infatuated fool before. Now you want them to fasten that filthy word 'complacent' on me. You want me to overlook what you have done and what you've brought me to. I'm just to say: 'Well, Persis, you've had your lover and your fling, and you're tired of each other, so come home and welcome, and don't worry over what's past. It's a mere trifle not worth discussing. What's the Seventh Commandment between friends?"
She was trying to silence him, but he had not heeded the return of Crofts till the pheasant was placed before him in all its garnishment, and the plates and the carving-fork and the small game-knife. He was ashamed, not of what he had said of her, but of his own excitement.
"Is the knife sharp?" he asked, for lack of other topic.
"Oh yes, sir," said Crofts. "I steeled it myself."