e no longer husband and wife? Doubtless that was what he expected to
hear from her; his view of her character, which she understood
sufficiently well, would lead him to think that.

But she had no impulse to leave his house. The example of Mrs. Travis
was too near. Escape, with or without melodramatic notes of farewell,
never suggested itself. She knew that it was a practical impossibility
to make that absolute severance of their lives without which they were
still man and wife, though at a distance from each other; they must
still be linked by material interests, by common acquaintances. The end
of sham heroics would come, sooner or later, in the same way as to Mrs.
Travis. How was her life different from what it had been yesterday? By
an addition of shame and scorn, that was all; actually, nothing was
altered. When Reuben heard that she was remaining at home, he would
come to her. Perhaps they might go to live in some other place; that
was all.

Tea was brought in, but she paid no heed to it. Sunset and twilight
came; the room grew dusk; then the servants appeared with lamps. She
dined, returned to the drawing room, and took up a book she had been
reading on her journey. It was a volume of Quinet, and insensibly its
interest concentrated her attention. She read for nearly two hours.

Then she was tired of it, and began to move restlessly about. Again she
grew impatient of the uncertainty whether Reuben would return to-night.
She lay upon a couch and tried to forget herself in recollection of
far-off places and people. But instead of the pictures she wished to
form, there kept coming before her mind the repulsive photograph which
Mrs. Travis had produced. Though she had barely glanced at it, she saw
it distinctly--the tawdry costume, the ignoble attitude, the shameless
and sordid face. It polluted her imagination.

Jealousy, of a woman such as that? Had she still loved him, she must
have broken her heart to think that he could fall so low. If it had
been told her that he was overcome by passion for a woman of some
nobleness, she could have heard it with resignation; in that there
would have been nothing base. But the choice he had made would not
allow her even the consolation of reflecting that she felt no jealousy;
it compelled her to involve him in the scorn, if not in the loathing,
with which that portrait inspired her.

That he merely had ceased to love her, what right had she to blame him?
The very word of "b