s leaning
over the table.

"Good-by," he said at last.

She said, "Good-by, Roddy," and watched him walking across the lobby and
out into the rain. He'd left his newspaper. She took it, gripped it in
both hands, just as he'd done, then, with an effort, got up and mounted
the stairs to her room. Dolly, fortunately, had gone out.

The violent struggle she had had to make during the last few moments in
her effort to retain her self-control, had pretty well exhausted her.
Only, had it been self-control, after all? That question shook her. Had
she meant to be merciless to him like that; to send him away utterly
discouraged in his sad humility, when the touch of an outreached hand
would have changed the whole face of the world for him? Had she really
been as noble as she felt while she was defending the impregnable
righteousness of her position and so completely demolishing his?

She remembered a day when he had been beaten in a law-suit, and she had
waited for him to come to her in his discouragement for help and
comfort. It was thus he had come to her to-day. How helpless he was!
What a boy he was!

Her memory flashed back over their not quite two years of life together
and she realized that he had always been like that whenever his emotions
toward her came into play. All his finely trained, formidable
intelligence had always deserted him here. She remembered his having
told her, the night he'd turned her out of his office, that his mind had
to run cold. She hadn't really known what he meant. She saw now that her
own mind didn't run cold, that it never really aroused itself except
under the spur of strong emotion. So that just where he was most
helpless, she was at her strongest. A victory over him in those
circumstances, was about as much to feel triumphant over as one over a
small child would be.

She realized now, more fully than before, what a crucifixion of his
boyish pride it must have been to see her on the stage. It was no answer
to say that with his intellectual concept of the ideal relations between
men and women, he shouldn't have felt like that. Shouldn't have felt!
The phrase was self-contradictory. Feelings weren't decorative
abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and
esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and
sent home. They were things that happened to you. In this case, two
violently opposed feelings of terrible intensity had happened to him at
once; h