"This is what I am driving at, Stuart," she began, a little more spiritedly. But then she stopped, as if dumb before it. She looked over at him as if hoping her eyes would tell it for her. But as he continued in that look of waiting, impatient bewilderment she sighed and turned a little away. "Don't you think, Stuart," she asked, her voice low, "that the future is rather too important a thing to be given up to ratifying the past?"
He pushed his chair back in impatience that was mounting to anger. "Just what do you mean?" he asked, stiffly.
She picked up the long envelope lying on the table between them. She held it in her hand a moment without speaking. For as she touched it she had a sense of what it would have meant to have held it in her hand twelve years before, over on the other side of their life together, a new sense of the irony and the pity of not having had it then—and having it now. She laid it down between them. "To me," she said, "this sets me free.
"Free to choose," she went on, as he only stared at her. There was a moment of looking at him out of eyes so full of feeling that they held back the feeling that had flushed his face. "And my choice," she said, with a strange steadiness, "is that I now go my way alone."
He spoke then; but it was only to stammer: "Why,—Ruth!" Helplessly he repeated: "Ruth!"
"But you see? You do see?" she cried. "If it had not been so much—so beautiful! Just because it was what it was—" She choked and could not go on.
He came around and sat down beside her. The seriousness of his face, something she had touched in him, made it finer than it had been in those last years of routine. It was more as it used to be. His voice too seemed out of old days as he said: "Ruth, I don't know yet what you mean—why you're saying this?"
"I think you do, Stuart," she said simply. "Or I think you will, if you'll let yourself. It's simply that this—" she touched the envelope on the table before her—"that this finds us over on the other side of marriage. And this is what I mean!" she flamed. "I mean that the marriage between us was too real to go through the mockery this would make possible now!" She turned away because she was close to tears.
He sat there in silence. Then, "Have I done anything, Ruth?" he asked in the hesitating way of one at sea.
She shook her head without turning back to him.