Yes, she had made a mistake! But she would retrieve it. She would free
herself. She would no longer put up with Roger, with his neglect and
deceit--his disagreeable and ungrateful mother--his immoral friends--and
this dull, soul-deadening English life.

Roger moved and murmured. She retreated a little, still looking at him
fixedly. Was it the child's name? Perhaps. He dreamed interminably, and
very often of Beatty. But it did not move her. Beatty, of course, was
_her_ child. Every child belongs to the mother in a far profounder sense
than to the father. And he, too, would be free; he would naturally marry
again.

Case after case of divorce ran through her mind as she stood there; the
persons and circumstances all well known to her. Other stories also, not
personally within her ken; the famous scandals of the time, much
discussed throughout American society. Her wits cleared and steeled. She
began to see the course that she must follow.

It would all depend upon the lawyers; and a good deal--she faced
it--upon money. All sorts of technical phrases, vaguely remembered, ran
through her mind. She would have to recover her American
citizenship--she and the child. A domicile of six months in South
Dakota, or in Wyoming--a year in Philadelphia--she began to recall
information derived of old from Madeleine Verrier, who had, of course,
been forced to consider all these things, and to weigh alternatives.
Advice, of course, must be asked of her at once--and sympathy.

Suddenly, on her brooding, there broke a wave of excitement. Life,
instead of being closed, as in a sense it is, for every married woman,
was in a moment open and vague again; the doors flung wide to flaming
heavens. An intoxication of recovered youth and freedom possessed her.
The sleeping Roger represented things intolerable and outworn. Why
should a woman of her gifts, of her opportunities, be chained for life
to this commonplace man, now that her passion was over?--now that she
knew him for what he was, weak, feather-brained, and vicious? She looked
at him with a kind of exaltation, spurning him from her path.

But the immediate future!--the practical steps! What kind of evidence
would she want?--what kind of witnesses? Something more, no doubt, of
both than she had already. She must wait--temporize--do nothing rashly.
If it was for Roger's good as well as her own that they should be free
of each other--and she was fast persuading herself of this--she must