us, getting rid of us for a whole year! I'd been watching you for so
long, and seeing you change, and get irritated with it all, and trying
to keep young for you when I was tired out. And that night, when I saw
how I'd failed, how dead your love was--"

"No; it was never dead, Marie."

"Wasn't it? Was it sleeping, then? Where was it? What was it doing?"

"You see--"

"Oh, yes, I see. I saw, then, how joyfully you shelved us all. You
were like a boy let out of school. And I'd worked so hard to keep home
happy for you, but you just thought of it as a place of bills and
worry and children, presided over by a perpetual asker. That night
before you went, do you remember leaving me to mend your things?"

"Yes."

"When you had gone, I cried, and prayed; it didn't do any good. I
didn't know women could suffer so--even when the children were born--"

Osborn sprang up. "Don't," he said hurriedly, with visions of anguish
in his mind.

"Very well. I don't want to harrow you. I'm only just giving the
explanation you asked. A year ago you left me, glad to go, and I
thought my heart would break. But it didn't. And it's changed. You've
come back--to exact again all the things that husbands do exact. But I
don't want you."

She had appalled him.

He stammered hoarsely: "I don't understand--I can't see what you want
us to do."

"Well; to live--apart."

"You can't mean it."

"But I do. How often am I to say, I don't want you? The last part of
this year, after the pain was over, I've been as glad to be without
you as during the first part of the year you were glad to be without
me. Isn't that plain?"

"You're making it horribly plain. And now I'm going to ask you, could
I help being poor and short of cash?"

She shook her head. "No! But I couldn't either, and you were awfully
down on me."

"'Down' on you! _I!_"

"You grumbled persistently every day. The kiddies and I just waited
upon your moods. And if I had to ask for anything, you weren't kind
about it; you just flung out of the place, leaving me all the worries.
You never helped nor shared. I've come to this conclusion lately; that
it simply isn't worth while living with a person who grumbles
persistently and has to be propitiated every day."

He reflected deeply, his hands in his trousers pockets.

"I think I'm taking all this sermon peaceably enough," he barked
savagely.

Again he had that disaffected look from her; she seemed to analyse him
coldly.

"It