with
a full sense of the inadequacy of the remark, and a suspicion of its
hypocrisy.

"That isn't quite true," she answered. "In the first place, you don't
need me. I am not of the slightest use in your life, I haven't been a
factor in it for years. You ought never to have married me,--it was all
a terrible mistake. I began to realize that after we had been married
a few months--even when we were on our wedding trip. But I was too
inexperienced--perhaps too weak to acknowledge it to myself. In the last
few years I have come to see it plainly. I should have been a fool if I
hadn't. I am not your wife in any real sense of the word, I cannot hold
you, I cannot even interest you. It's a situation that no woman with
self-respect can endure."

"Aren't those rather modern sentiments, for you, Maude?" I said.

She flushed a little, but otherwise retained her remarkable composure.

"I don't care whether they are 'modern' or not, I only know that my
position has become impossible."

I walked to the other end of the room, and stood facing the carefully
drawn curtains of the windows; fantastically, they seemed to represent
the impasse to which my mind had come. Did she intend, ultimately, to
get a divorce? I dared not ask her. The word rang horribly in my ears,
though unpronounced; and I knew then that I lacked her courage, and the
knowledge was part of my agony.

I turned.

"Don't you think you've overdrawn things, Maude exaggerated them? No
marriages are perfect. You've let your mind dwell until it has become
inflamed on matters which really don't amount to much."

"I was never saner, Hugh," she replied instantly. And indeed I was
forced to confess that she looked it. That new Maude I had seen emerging
of late years seemed now to have found herself; she was no longer the
woman I had married,--yielding, willing to overlook, anxious to please,
living in me.

"I don't influence you, or help you in any way. I never have."

"Oh, that's not true," I protested.

But she cut me short, going on inexorably:--"I am merely your
housekeeper, and rather a poor one at that, from your point of view. You
ignore me. I am not blaming you for it--you are made that way. It's
true that you have always supported me in luxury,--that might have been
enough for another woman. It isn't enough for me--I, too, have a life to
live, a soul to be responsible for. It's not for my sake so much as for
the children's that I don't want it to be crushe