He flushed darkly and the temper began to escape in his voice:

"Has anybody hinted that I couldn't? Have you been discussing my
personal business affairs with any of the pups whom you drag about at
your heels? No matter what your personal attitude toward me may be, only
a fool would undermine the very house that----"

"I don't believe you understand, Jack," she said quietly; "I care
absolutely nothing about your house."

"Well, you care about your own social status, I suppose!" he retorted
sharply.

"Not very much."

"That's an imbecile thing to say!"

"Is it?" She turned to the mirror and touched her powdered hair lightly
with both hands, and continued speaking with her back turned toward him:

"I married you for love. Remember that. There was even something of it
alive in the roots, I think, until within a few days--in spite of what
you are, what you have done to me. Now the thing is dead. I can tell you
when it died, if you like."

And as he said nothing:

"It died when I came in late one evening, and, passing my corridor and a
certain locked door, I heard a young girl sobbing. Then it died."

She turned on him, contemptuously indifferent, and surveyed him at her
leisure:

"Your conduct to me has been such as to deliberately incite me to evil.
Your attitude has been a constant occult force, driving me toward it. By
the life you have led, and compelled me to lead, you have virtually set
a premium upon my infidelity. What you may have done, I don't know; what
you have done, even recently, I am not sure of. But I know this: you
took my life and made a parody of it. I never lived; I have been tempted
to. If the opportunity comes, I will."

Dysart rose, his face red and distorted:

"I thought young Mallett had taught you to live pretty rapidly!" he
said.

"No," she replied, "you only thought other people thought so. That is
why you resented it. Your jealousy is of that sort--you don't care what
I am, but you do care what the world thinks I am. And that is all there
ever was to you--all there ever will be: desperate devotion to your
wretched little social status, which includes sufficient money and a
chaste wife to make it secure."

She laughed; fastened a gardenia in her hair:

"I don't know about your money, and I don't care. As for your wife, she
will remain chaste as long as it suits her, and not one fraction of a
second longer."

"Are you crazy?" he demanded.

"Why, it does seem crazy to you,