o differently about marriage over here: it's just a business
contract. As long as a woman doesn't make a show of herself no one
cares." She put her other hand up, so that she held him facing her.
"I've always felt, all through everything, that I belonged to you."

Moffatt left her hands on his shoulders, but did not lift his own to
clasp them. For a moment she thought she had mistaken him, and a leaden
sense of shame descended on her. Then he asked: "You say your husband
goes with other women?"

Lili Estradina's taunt flashed through her and she seized on it. "People
have told me so--his own relations have. I've never stooped to spy on
him...."

"And the women in your set--I suppose it's taken for granted they all do
the same?"

She laughed.

"Everything fixed up for them, same as it is for the husbands, eh?
Nobody meddles or makes trouble if you know the ropes?"

"No, nobody ... it's all quite easy...." She stopped, her faint
smile checked, as his backward movement made her hands drop from his
shoulders.

"And that's what you're proposing to me? That you and I should do like
the rest of 'em?" His face had lost its comic roundness and grown harsh
and dark, as it had when her father had taken her away from him at
Opake. He turned on his heel, walked the length of the room and halted
with his back to her in the embrasure of the window. There he paused
a full minute, his hands in his pockets, staring out at the perpetual
interweaving of motors in the luminous setting of the square. Then he
turned and spoke from where he stood.

"Look here. Undine, if I'm to have you again I don't want to have you
that way. That time out in Apex, when everybody in the place was against
me, and I was down and out, you stood up to them and stuck by me.
Remember that walk down Main Street? Don't I!--and the way the people
glared and hurried by; and how you kept on alongside of me, talking and
laughing, and looking your Sunday best. When Abner Spragg came out to
Opake after us and pulled you back I was pretty sore at your deserting;
but I came to see it was natural enough. You were only a spoilt girl,
used to having everything you wanted; and I couldn't give you a thing
then, and the folks you'd been taught to believe in all told you I never
would. Well, I did look like a back number, and no blame to you for
thinking so. I used to say it to myself over and over again, laying
awake nights and totting up my mistakes ... and then there w