use for me--"

"Well?"

"Don't expect too much of me, that's all."

"I have told you that I expect nothing."

"Then you ought to!" he broke out angrily.

"I thought men appreciated complaisant wives."

"Complaisant? It's callousness; don't-careness. You mean me to
understand, then, that you've reckoned with everything?"

"No, I don't. I mean you to understand that I don't trouble to do any
reckoning about you at all."

As she uttered the words she was conscious of the brutality of them;
but she was speaking truth, representing those feelings which had
taken the place of love-emotions in her heart; and what else was there
to say?

"I must say," he said, "you're candid."

"I want to be. If we once thoroughly understood each other we'd shake
down better and go our ways in peace. I don't want formal separation,
for the children's sake."

"Formal separation? If we had that, because you refused to live with
me, desertion would be constituted and _I'd_ get the children,
you know."

"I wonder," she said, starting. "I should fight."

He saw the set meditation on her face under the moonlight.

"Would there be nothing I could say?" she asked, lifting her eyes to
his. "I wonder if there'd be no countercharge ingenuity could bring?"

She did not mean what occurred to him; the things in her mind were of
too untechnical a nature to find a hearing in the divorce courts; but
as she asked her question suddenly his heart seemed to rock and to
stand still for a space, while he shifted his eyes rapidly from hers
and gazed straight out over the steering-wheel, down the hill, into
the blue-white moonlit distance.

Roselle!

Who would believe his innocent tale if he stood up in that sad court
which recorded the most human of all frailties, and said: "We
travelled together here and we travelled together there; and I
defrayed these expenses and those expenses; and I've kissed her; and
yes, we've certainly been alone in very compromising circumstances,
but I ask you to believe that technically my marital honour is intact,
and that I've been true and faithful to my wife"?

The fun and the folly which had been so worth while, so like a draught
of wine on the cold journey through middle-class pauperism, now
appeared stripped of their carnival trappings. It was only folly which
stared back at him now, and she had become ugly; sickening and wholly
undesirable. Folly was utter trash. He replied to Marie in a voice so
studied a