She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has left me in the evening—when he didn't have to?"
I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her—and help him. And all at once I felt as if I was ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.
Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comes to any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes.
"What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all, instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did.
She stared at me. "Don't you understand," she says, "what it means?"
"Why, it means," says I, "that he wants a game of billiards, the way any other man does, once in a while."
She shook her head, mournful.
"Three years ago this Winter," says she, "only three short years ago, every minute of the world that Russell had free, he wanted to spend with me. That Winter before we were married, do you suppose that anybody—anybody could have got him to play billiards with him if he could have been with me?"
I thought it over. "Well," I says, "no. Likely not. But then, you see, he couldn't be with you every evening—and that just naturally give him some nights off."
"'Some nights off,'" she says. "Oh, if you think that is the way he looks at it—There is no way in this world that I would rather spend my evenings," she says, "than to sit here with my husband."