“No.”
“Then why should you make deliberate shipwreck of your life—or let him do it for you? Just now you don’t care what becomes of you. But you have to keep on the best you can.”
He spoke quietly, his words unstressed, but just for a flash she caught in his eyes an expression that told her his emotions were a banked volcano. Mollie found herself trembling.
“No—no. I married him, for better or worse. I’ll stay with him.”
“Can you stay with him when he doesn’t want you, when he won’t stay with you?”
“Perhaps he’ll change,” she murmured.
The knuckles of his clenched hand were bloodless, she noticed.
“Men of his age don’t change. They’re what they have made themselves. They can’t be anything else. Would you waste your life on such an impossible chance? Don’t do it. Begin again.”
“How?” she asked.
“There’s work at Virginia for a hundred women. You can mend clothes or cook or keep boarders—anything for a start. Afterwards——” He let the future take care of itself.