out
to you. You know what has happened. You have said it, it is obvious to
anyone with any sense of human values. Make an end! Make an end! Come
away from a position where only an outworn old ideal holds you to
futility and waste. Come away where you will really live and know the
fullness of life. Come away from that false notion of duty which makes
you do for the children what you know is not best for them, only because
it is the traditional thing to do, only because it gives you a martyr's
crown to wear. I don't say anything now, as I would to any other woman
in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all
that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of keeping
such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid
prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and
harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me give it to you. All
that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness waiting for you to
create it to glorious being, all that is nothing compared to what has
come to pass between us, you and me; compared to that other world of
impassioned living existence that is waiting for you. Come away from the
man who is nothing more to you than the house you live in . . . nothing
but a habit."

She started at this, moving out of the stony immobility in which she
gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had moved, was
incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex start as though
she had been struck. But at the sight of it, the flame in his eyes
leaped up. "No, no, no!" he cried with an insistent triumph, "he is
nothing more to you than a habit. And you are nothing more to him. You
were right, on that evening when you shrank away from the sight of the
place in Italy where in your ignorant youth you made the mistake of
trying to join your life to his. There is not a breath you draw, not a
turn of your head or body . . . I know them all . . . that does not prove
that he is nothing to you now. I have seen you take a handkerchief from
his pocket as you would take it from a bureau-drawer. I have seen him
set you on one side, to pass through a door, as he would set a chair on
one side. You don't even see him any more when you look at him, and he
doesn't see you. Whatever there may have been between you, if there was
ever anything real, it is dead now, dead and buried . . . and you the most
living woman who ever wore flesh and