e could at least
try....

"Morris," she said softly. "Suppose we try to look at it all from
another angle? Suppose we try to see it all as though _we_ weren't
concerned in it--as if some one had asked our impartial advice? Don't
you think that would be a good way to get at it?"

"But what is it you want to 'get at,' Sophy? What is it you want me to
do? God knows I'm ready to do anything...."

"Anything?"

"Yes ... anything in reason," he hedged nervously.

"Would you call it reasonable for us both to be free?"

He started--eyed her suspiciously.

"How 'free'? Free in what way?"

"Quite, quite free, Morris."

He paled.

"Divorce...?" he said.

"Yes."

"You want to divorce me?"

"I want us both to have our own lives wholly in our own hands
again--that is the only way."

He stared at her, whiter and whiter.

"Didn't you ever ... love me ... at all?" he managed, at last.

"Ah!--you know whether I loved you...."

"You ... you mean ... I ... I've killed it?"

"Yes, dear."

"Oh, you are cruel ... you are cruel!..." he burst out. He stared at
her, his face working. "You're the crudest woman God ever made!" he said
huskily.

Sophy was white too. She, too, stammered a little.

"I ... I think ... that truth ... is nearly always cruel," she said.
"But it's only truth that will make us free----"

His hands were gripping the sides of the chair into which he had sunk
again, so that his arms trembled.

"Damn the truth, then...!" he said slowly and thickly.

"You'd want to keep a wife who doesn't love you as a wife should?"

"Yes, I want to keep you.... I want to keep you if you _hate_ me!...
Yes. Yes."

"_That_ is cruelty...."

"Is it? Then I'm cruel, too."

Sophy sat with her eyes on his suffused, lowering face. Her hand went to
and fro over the collie's head. She sat so long thus, without speaking,
that he said gruffly:

"Well? What now? Why do you stare so?"

"I'm trying to imagine how it would be to feel like that. I'm trying to
get your point of view."

"How ... my point of view?"

"The wanting to hold a woman against her will. But I can't understand
it. I never understood how a man or woman could want to hold another
when love had gone ... the love that is the only reason for marriage."

"You rub it in, don't you?"

She said sadly:

"Why do you speak so roughly and bitterly to me--as if it were my love
only that had failed? Do you think I didn't know when first your love
began to