matter, Angela?" he begged. "I know there's something.
Now what is it? You're tired, or you're sick, or something has happened.
Is it anything that I have done? Look at me! Is it?"

Angela held away from him, looking down. She did not know how to begin
this but she wanted to make him terribly sorry if she could, as sorry as
she was for herself. She thought he ought to be; that if he had any true
feeling of shame and sympathy in him he would be. Her own condition in
the face of his shameless past was terrible. She had no one to love her.
She had no one to turn to. Her own family did not understand her life
any more--it had changed so. She was a different woman now, greater,
more important, more distinguished. Her experiences with Eugene here in
New York, in Paris, in London and even before her marriage, in Chicago
and Blackwood, had changed her point of view. She was no longer the same
in her ideas, she thought, and to find herself deserted in this way
emotionally--not really loved, not ever having been really loved but
just toyed with, made a doll and a plaything, was terrible.

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed in a shrill staccato, "I don't know what to
do! I don't know what to say! I don't know what to think! If I only knew
how to think or what to do!"

"What's the matter?" begged Eugene, releasing his hold and turning his
thoughts partially to himself and his own condition as well as to hers.
His nerves were put on edge by these emotional tantrums--his brain
fairly ached. It made his hands tremble. In his days of physical and
nervous soundness it did not matter, but now, when he was sick, when his
own heart was weak, as he fancied, and his nerves set to jangling by the
least discord, it was almost more than he could bear. "Why don't you
speak?" he insisted. "You know I can't stand this. I'm in no condition.
What's the trouble? What's the use of carrying on this way? Are you
going to tell me?"

"There!" Angela said, pointing her finger at the box of letters she had
laid aside on the window-sill. She knew he would see them, would
remember instantly what they were about.

Eugene looked. The box came to his memory instantly. He picked it up
nervously, sheepishly, for this was like a blow in the face which he had
no power to resist. The whole peculiar nature of his transactions with
Ruby and with Christina came back to him, not as they had looked to him
at the time, but as they were appearing to Angela now. What must she
th