not understand that constant holding back. For him the beauty of love
was in the expression of it. She supposed, in this curious
self-indulgence of facing things tonight, that it had been he who was
normal; she had memories of many times when she had puzzled and
disappointed and hurt him.

And so when Gertrude Freemont--an old school friend of hers, a
warm-natured Southern girl--came to visit her, Stuart turned away from
things grudging and often chill to Gertrude's playfulness and sunniness
and warmth. There was a curious shock to her tonight when she found
herself actually thinking that perhaps it was not much to be wondered
at. He was like that. She had not made him over to be like her.

At first he had found Gertrude enlivening, and from a flirtation it went
to one of those passages of passion between a man and a woman, a thing
that flames up and then dies away, in a measure a matter of
circumstance. That was the way he tried to explain it to her when, just
as Gertrude was leaving, she came to know--even in this present
abandonment to thinking she went hurriedly past the shock of that
terrible sordid night of "finding out." Stuart had weakly and
appealingly said that he hadn't been able to help it, that he was
sorry--that it was all over.

But with it their marriage was all over. She told him so then--told him
quite calmly, it would seem serenely; went on telling him so through
those first days of his unhappiness and persistence. She was always
quite unperturbed in telling him so. Politely, almost pleasantly, she
would tell him that she would never be his wife again.

She never was. She had known very certainly from the first that she
never would be. Tonight she probed into that too--why she had been so
sure, why she had never wavered. It was a more inner thing than just
jealousy, resentment, hurt, revenge--though all those things were there
too. But those were things that might have broken down, and this was not
a thing that would break down. It was more particularly temperamental
than any of those things. It was that thing in her which had always held
her back from giving. She _had_ given--and then her giving had been
outraged! Even now she burned in the thought of that. He had called out
a thing in her that she had all along--just because she was as she
was--resented having had called out. And then he had flouted it. Even
after all those years there was tonight that old prickling of her scalp
in thinking of