she went on, after a moment. "I
began earlier than you, I had to." I looked up suddenly and saw her
smiling at me, faintly, through her tears. "But I've been thinking more,
and learning more since I've been over here. I've come to see that that
our failure hasn't been as much your fault as I once thought, as much as
you yourself declare. You have done me a wrong, and you've done the
children a wrong. Oh, it is frightful to think how little I knew when I
married you, but even then I felt instinctively that you didn't love me
as I deserved to be loved. And when we came back from Europe I knew that
I couldn't satisfy you, I couldn't look upon life as you saw it, no
matter how hard I tried. I did try, but it wasn't any use. You'll never
know how much I've suffered all these years.

"I have been happier here, away from you, with the children; I've had a
chance to be myself. It isn't that I'm--much. It isn't that I don't need
guidance and counsel and--sympathy. I've missed those, but you've never
given them to me, and I've been learning more and more to do without
them. I don't know why marriage should suddenly have become such a
mockery and failure in our time, but I know that it is, that ours hasn't
been such an exception as I once thought. I've come to believe that
divorce is often justified."

"It is justified so far as you are concerned, Maude," I replied. "It is
not justified for me. I have forfeited, as I say, any rights over you. I
have been the aggressor and transgressor from the start. You have been a
good wife and a good mother, you have been faithful, I have had
absolutely nothing to complain of."

"Sometimes I think I might have tried harder," she said. "At least I
might have understood better. I was stupid. But everything went wrong.
And I saw you growing away from me all the time, Hugh, growing away from
the friends who were fond of you, as though you were fading in the
distance. It wasn't wholly because--because of Nancy that I left you.
That gave me an excuse--an excuse for myself. Long before that I realized
my helplessness, I knew that whatever I might have done was past doing."

"Yes, I know," I assented.

We sat in silence for a while. The train was skirting an ancient town set
on a hill, crowned with a castle and a Gothic church whose windows were
afire in the setting sun.

"Maude," I said, "I have not come to plead, to appeal to your pity as
against your judgment and reason. I can say this much,