As though to cap the climax of tragedy, he smiled as he produced his cigarette case. And she was swept, as it were, by a scarlet flame that deprived her for the moment of speech.
"Well," he said complacently, "there's no accounting for women. A case of nerves—eh, Honora? Been hitting the pace a little too hard, I guess." He lighted a match, blissfully unaware of the quality of her look. "All of us have to get toned up once in a while. I need it myself. I've had to drink a case of Scotch whiskey out West to get this deal through. Now what's the name of that new boat with everything on her from a cafe to a Stock Exchange? A German name."
"I don't know," said Honora. She had answered automatically.
To the imminent peril of one of the frailest of Mrs. Forsythe's chairs, he sat down on it, placed his hands on his knees, flung back his head, and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. Still she stared at him, as in a state of semi-hypnosis.
"Instead of going off to one of those thousand-dollar-a-minute doctors, let me prescribe for you," he said. "I've handled some nervous men in my time, and I guess nervous women aren't much different. You've had these little attacks before, and they blow over—don't they? Wing owes me a vacation. If I do say it myself, there are not five men in New York who would have pulled off this deal for him. Now the proposition I was going to make to you is this: that we get cosey in a cabin de luxe on that German boat, hire an automobile on the other side, and do up Europe. It's a sort of a handicap never to have been over there."
"Oh, you're making it very hard for me, Howard," she cried. "I might have known that you couldn't understand, that you never could understand—why I am going away. I've lived with you all this time, and you do not know me any better than you know—the scrub-woman. I'm going away from you—forever."
In spite of herself, she ended with an uncontrollable sob.
"Forever!" he repeated, but he continued to smoke and to look at her without any evidences of emotion, very much as though he had received an ultimatum in a business transaction. And then there crept into his expression something of a complacent pity that braced her to continue. "Why?" he asked.
"Because—because I don't love you. Because you don't love me. You don't know what love is—you never will."
"But we're married," he said. "We get along all right."