boasted self-control. She forestalled him at the
door.

'What resolution?' she asked.

He looked down at her an instant, clothed from head to foot in that
indefinable armour of unapproachableness. This was a man who asked other
people questions, himself ill-accustomed to be catechised. If he replied
it was a grace.

'I came here,' he said, 'under considerable pressure, to speak of the
future. Not to reopen the past.'

'The future and the past are one,' said the woman at the door.

'You talk as if that old madness was mine alone; it is the woman's way.'

'I know,' she agreed, to his obvious surprise, 'and it's not fair. Men
suffer as well as we by the woman's starting wrong. We are taught to
think the man a sort of demi-god. If he tells her, "Go down into hell,"
down into hell she goes.'

He would not have been human had he not resented that harsh summary of
those days that lay behind.

'Make no mistake,' he said. 'Not the woman alone. _They go down
together._'

'Yes, they go down together. But the man comes up alone. As a rule. It
is more convenient so--_for him_. And even for the other woman.'

Both pairs of eyes went to Jean's door.

'My conscience is clear,' he said angrily. 'I know--and so do you--that
most men in my position wouldn't have troubled themselves. I gave myself
endless trouble.'

She looked at him with wondering eyes. 'So you've gone about all these
years feeling that you'd discharged every obligation?'

'Not only that. I stood by you with a fidelity that was nothing short of
Quixotic. If, woman-like, you _must_ recall the past, I insist on your
recalling it correctly.'

'You think I don't recall it correctly?' she said very low.

'Not when you make--other people believe that I deserted you!' The
gathering volume of his righteous wrath swept the cool precision out of
his voice. 'It's a curious enough charge,' he said, 'when you stop to
consider----' Again he checked himself, and, with a gesture of
impatience, was for sweeping the whole thing out of his way, including
that figure at the door.

But she stood there. 'Well, when we do just for five minutes out of ten
years--when we do stop to consider----'

'We remember it was _you_ who did the deserting. And since you had to
rake the story up, you might have had the fairness to tell the facts.'

'You think "the facts" would have excused you?'

It was a new view. She left the door, and sat down in the nearest chair.

'No doubt you