uch improved that no
night nurse was needed--only a twelve-hour one.

"Well," he said solemnly but coldly, when he saw her pale, distraught,
much of her old, youthful beauty still with her, "you think you have
scored a splendid trick, don't you? You think you have sprung a trap? I
simply came in here to tell you that you haven't--that you have only
seen the beginning of the end. You say you are going to have a child. I
don't believe it. It's a lie, and you know it's a lie. You saw that
there was an end coming to all this state of weariness some time, and
this is your answer. Well, you've played one trick too many, and you've
played it in vain. You lose. I win this time. I'm going to be free now,
I want to say to you, and I am going to be free if I have to turn
everything upside down. I don't care if there were seventeen prospective
children instead of one. It's a lie, in the first place; but if it
isn't, it's a trick, and I'm not going to be tricked any longer. I've
had all I want of domination and trickery and cheap ideas. I'm through
now, do you hear me? I'm through."

He felt his forehead with a nervous hand. His head ached, he was half
sick. This was such a dreary pit to find himself in, this pit of
matrimony, chained by a domineering wife and a trickily manoeuvred
child. His child! What a mockery at this stage of his life! How he hated
the thought of that sort of thing, how cheap it all seemed!

Angela, who was wide-eyed, flushed, exhausted, lying staring on her
pillow, asked in a weary, indifferent voice: "What do you want me to do,
Eugene, leave you?"

"I'll tell you, Angela," he said sepulchrally, "I don't know what I want
you to do just at this moment. The old life is all over. It's as dead as
dead can be. For eleven or twelve years now I have lived with you,
knowing all the while that I was living a lie. I have never really loved
you since we were married. You know that. I may have loved you in the
beginning, yes, I did, and at Blackwood, but that was a long, long while
ago. I never should have married you. It was a mistake, but I did, and
I've paid for it, inch by inch. You have, too. You have insisted all
along that I ought to love you. You have browbeaten and abused me for
something I could no more do than I could fly. Now, at this last minute,
you introduce a child to hold me. I know why you have done it. You
imagine that in some way you have been appointed by God to be my mentor
and guardian. Well, I