f stuff seems to me you don't look very crisp and jaunty."

"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl, and then he
would brush past the men who were crowded around him, and turn in
my direction. And the old hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing,
sobbing sensation would have me by the throat again.

Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his very vices. His love
of drink? A weakness which I would transform into strength. His white
hot flashes of uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down at
my cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and irritability? Mere
evidences of the genius within. Oh, my worshiping soul was always alert
with an excuse.

And so we were married. He had quite tired of me in less than a year,
and the hand that had always shaken a little shook a great deal now,
and the fits of abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear
oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh, sometimes, when I was
alone, at the bitter humor of it all. It was like a Duchess novel come
to life.

His work began to show slipshod in spots. They talked to him about it
and he laughed at them. Then, one day, he left them in the ditch on the
big story of the McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and
the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses had become too
frequent. They would have to replace him with a man not so brilliant,
perhaps, but more reliable.

I daren't think of his face as it looked when he came home to the little
apartment and told me. The smoldering eyes were flaming now. His lips
were flecked with a sort of foam. I stared at him in horror. He strode
over to me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as a dog
shakes a mouse.

"Why don't you cry, eh?" he snarled. "Why don't you cry!"

And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I wrenched myself
free, fled to my room, and locked the door and stood against it with
my hand pressed over my heart until I heard the outer door slam and the
echo of his footsteps die away.

Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would be cowardly now. I
would wait until he was on his feet again, and then I would demand my
old free life back once more. This existence that was dragging me into
the gutter--this was not life! Life was a glorious, beautiful thing, and
I would have it yet. I laid my plans, feverishly, and waited. He did
not come back that night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In