to a
Stock Exchange? A German name."

"I don't know," said Honora. She had answered automatically.

To the imminent peril of one of the frailest of Mrs. Forsythe's chairs,
he sat down on it, placed his hands on his knees, flung back his head,
and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. Still she stared at him, as in a
state of semi-hypnosis.

"Instead of going off to one of those thousand-dollar-a-minute doctors,
let me prescribe for you," he said. "I've handled some nervous men in my
time, and I guess nervous women aren't much different. You've had these
little attacks before, and they blow over--don't they? Wing owes me a
vacation. If I do say it myself, there are not five men in New York who
would have pulled off this deal for him. Now the proposition I was going
to make to you is this: that we get cosey in a cabin de luxe on that
German boat, hire an automobile on the other side, and do up Europe. It's
a sort of a handicap never to have been over there."

"Oh, you're making it very hard for me, Howard," she cried. "I might have
known that you couldn't understand, that you never could understand--why
I am going away. I've lived with you all this time, and you do not know
me any better than you know--the scrub-woman. I'm going away from
you--forever."

In spite of herself, she ended with an uncontrollable sob.

"Forever!" he repeated, but he continued to smoke and to look at her
without any evidences of emotion, very much as though he had received an
ultimatum in a business transaction. And then there crept into his
expression something of a complacent pity that braced her to continue.
"Why?" he asked.

"Because--because I don't love you. Because you don't love me. You don't
know what love is--you never will."

"But we're married," he said. "We get along all right."

"Oh, can't you see that that makes it all the worse!" she cried. "I can
stand it no longer. I can't live with you--I won't live with you. I'm of
no use to you--you're sufficient unto yourself. It was all a frightful
mistake. I brought nothing into your life, and I take nothing out of it.
We are strangers--we have always been so. I am not even your housekeeper.
Your whole interest in life is in your business, and you come home to
read the newspapers and to sleep! Home! The very word is a mockery. If
you had to choose between me and your business you wouldn't hesitate an
instant. And I--I have been starved. It isn't your fault, perhaps, that
you don