I--I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late. I did so
many things that were cruel and wrong--oh, Jim, Jim!"

She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears. I
could hardly believe that it was Bella. And Jim put both his arms around
her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye
he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt
Selina.

She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.

"That," she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, "that shameful picture
is due to your own indifference. I am not blind; I have seen how you
rejected all his loving advances." Bella drew away from Jim, but
he jerked her back. "If anything in the world would reconcile me to
divorce, it is this unbelievable situation. James, are you shameless?"

But James was and didn't care who knew it. And as there was nothing else
to do, and no one else to do it, I stood very straight against the door
frame, and told the whole miserable story from the very beginning. I
told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found
it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no
business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands
and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent;
my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated
them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own
minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke on Aunt Selina,
who hadn't understood until that minute.

In view of her principles, she might have been expected to turn on Jim
and Bella, and disinherit them, and cast them out, figuratively, with
the flaming sword of her tongue. BUT SHE DID NOT!

She turned on me in the most terrible way, and asked me how I dared to
come between husband and wife, because divorce or no divorce, whom God
hath joined together, and so on. And when Jim picked up his courage in
both hands and tried to interfere, she pushed him back with one hand
while she pointed the other at me and called me a Jezebel.

Chapter XIX. THE HARBISON MAN

She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she
scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being
occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with
Jim holding Bella's hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be
very good to make up for all the de