name and roll in the dirt and play dead to please
Jeanne? If Jeanne thinks I'm going to send you to a Raines hotel and
follow you up with detectives to furnish her with a fake divorce, you
can tell her I won't. What are they coming to?" demanded the best
friend. "What do they want? A man gives a woman all his love, all his
thoughts, gives her his name, his home; only asks to work his brains out
for her, only asks to see her happy. And she calls it 'charity,' calls
herself a 'slave'!" The best friend kicked violently at the place where
the waste-basket had been. "_Give_ them the vote, I say," he shouted.
"It's all they're good for!"

The violence of his friend did not impress Jimmie. As he walked up-town
the only part of the interview he carried with him was that there must
be no scandal. Not on his account. If Jeanne wished it, he assured
himself, in spite of the lawyer, he was willing, in the metaphor of that
gentleman, to "roll in the dirt and play dead." "Play dead!" The words
struck him full in the face. Were he dead and out of the way, Jeanne,
without a touch of scandal, could marry the man she loved. Jimmie halted
in his tracks. He believed he saw the only possible exit. He turned
into a side street, and between the silent houses, closed for the
summer, worked out his plan. For long afterward that city block remained
in his memory; the doctors' signs on the sills, the caretakers seeking
the air, the chauffeurs at the cab rank. For hours they watched the
passing and repassing of the young man, who with bent head and fixed
eyes struck at the pavement with his stick.

That he should really kill himself Jimmie did not for a moment
contemplate. To him self-destruction appeared only as an offense against
nature. On his primitive, out-of-door, fox-hunting mind the ethics of
suicide lay as uneasily as absinthe on the stomach of a baby. But, he
argued, by _pretending_ he were dead, he could set Jeanne free, could
save her from gossip, and could still dream of her, love her, and occupy
with her, if not the same continent, the same world.

He had three problems to solve, and as he considered them he devotedly
wished he might consult with a brain more clever than his own. But an
accomplice was out of the question. Were he to succeed, everybody must
be fooled; no one could share his secret. It was "a lone game, played
alone, and without my partner."

The three problems were: first, in order to protect his wife, to
provide