Deems Duffield sighed and drew on his fawn-hued gloves and sent a little whistling note through his shut teeth. Coming up to his wife, he looked at her and slowly shook his head. He placed his hands on her thin shoulders: their eyes met.
“It’s a fight, then, my dear?” He said this pleasantly.
“I am sorry, Deems, you have made such a ruin of our lives.”
“I am sorry, also, Laura.”
He drew her quickly to him. He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
“Good-by. You are the best thing I have ever had, and I hate to see that I have lost you. But it’s not the best things we need most, my dear. It’s the ordinary things. Often in life, we have to get along without the best in order to have the common.”
She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away. In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone.
She rang the bell.
“Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any one calls this afternoon, I am in.”
She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel. The Egoist of Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand.