that
fasten prison doors. He knew what a pang it would have been to him if he
had seen Esther Blake going year after year to carry her hoarded
sweetness to another man. But he wished she had done it. Some hardy,
righteous fibre in him would have been appeased.

"He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father
understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very
happy. Didn't you know that?"

Choate was glad and sorry.

"Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!"

"No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and
of course we're really strangers now."

The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here--that
Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional
pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on--and said to
her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It
makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't
true."

"So you see," said the real Esther to Choate, "I can't do anything. I
sit here alone with my hands tied, and grandma upstairs--of course I
can't leave grandma--and I can't do anything. Do you think--" she looked
very challenging and pure--"do you think it would be wicked of me to
dream of a divorce?"

Choate got up and walked to the fireplace. He put both hands on the
mantel and gripped it, and Esther, with that sense of implacable mastery
women feel at moments of sexual triumph, saw the knuckles whiten.

"Wouldn't it be better," she said, "for him? I don't care for myself,
though I'm very lonely, very much at sea; but it does seem to me it
would be better for him if he could be free and build his life up again
from the beginning."

Choate answered in a choked voice that made him shake his head
impatiently:

"It isn't better for any man to be free."

"Not if he doesn't care for his wife?" the master torturer proceeded,
more and more at ease now she saw how tight she had him.

Choate turned upon her. His pale face was scarred with an emotion as
deep as the source of tears, though she exulted to see he had no tears
to show her. Men should, she felt, be strong.

"Don't you know you mustn't say that kind of thing to me?" he asked
her. "Don't you see it's a temptation? I can't listen to it. I can't
consider it for a minute."

"Is it a temptation?" she asked, in a whisper, born, it seemed, of
unacknowledged intimacies between them. The whisper said, "If