“There is some one else!” he exclaimed, rising.
“There is every one else,” she said.
As was his habit when agitated, he began to smoke feverishly, glancing at her from time to time as she fingered the keys. Experience had led him to believe that he who finds a woman in revolt and gives her a religion inevitably becomes her possessor. But more than a month had passed, he had not become her possessor—and now for the first time there entered his mind a doubt as to having given her a religion! The obvious inference was that of another man, of another influence in opposition to his own; characteristically, however, he shrank from accepting this, since he was of those who believe what they wish to believe. The sudden fear of losing her—intruding itself immediately upon an ecstatic, creative mood—unnerved him, yet he strove to appear confident as he stood over her.
“When you've finished typewriting that, we'll go out to supper,” he told her.
But she shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don't want to,” she replied—and then, to soften her refusal, she added, “I can't, to-night.”
“But you never will come with me anymore. Why is it?”
“I'm very tired at night. I don't feel like going out.” She sought to temporize.
“You've changed!” he accused her. “You're not the same as you were at first—you avoid me.”