So I said it, right out plain:
"Oh," I says, "I guess sheer because I've seen so much unhappiness, and on up to divorce, come about sole because married folks will hunt in couples perpetual, and not let themselves be just folks."
When we got home—and we hadn't said much more all the way there—as we opened the living-room door, I saw that we'd got there first, before Russell. I was glad of that. Ellen ran right down the hall to the baby's room, and I took off my things and went down to the end of the room where the couch was, to lay down till she came back.
I must have dozed off, because I didn't hear Russell come in. The first I knew, he was standing with his back to the fire, filling his pipe. So I looked in his face, when he didn't know anybody was looking.
He had evidently walked home, and had come in fresh and glowing and full of frosty air, and his cheeks were ruddy. He was smiling a little at something or other, and altogether he looked not a bit like the tired man that had come home that night to dinner.
Then I heard the farther door click, and Ellen's step in the hall.
He looked toward the door, and I saw the queerest expression come in his face. Now, there was Russell, a man of twenty-seven or eight, a grown man that had lived his independent life for years before he had married Ellen. And yet, honestly, when he looked up then, his face and his eyes were like those of a boy that had done something that he had been scolded for. He looked kind of apologetic and explanatory—a look no man ought to be required to look unless for a real reason. It seems so—ignominious for a human being to have to look like that when they hadn't done a thing wrong.
My heart sank some. I thought of the way Ellen had been all slumped down in that easy chair, crying and taking on. And I waited for her to come in, feeling as if all the law and the prophets hung on the next few minutes—and I guess they did.
She'd put on a little, soft house-dress, made you-couldn't-tell-how, of lace, with blue showing through, kind of like clouds and the sky. But it was her face I looked at, because I remembered the set look it had when she'd told Russell good-by. And when I see her face now there in all that sky-and-clouds effect, honest, it was like a star.
"Hello, dear," she says, kind of sweet and casual, "put a stick of wood on the fire and tell me all about it."