"Send"--he did not even know the name of his wife's maid--"send her away!"

"Lucille, _laissez-moi; je vous sonnerai plus tard_!" Mrs. Ma.s.singale said directly, her eyes on her husband's face. She went to the door, closing it and came swiftly back.

"Harold, what is it?" she cried breathlessly. "Are we ruined?"

"No!" he said, with a touch of irony in his voice. "No; it is not money matters!"

She had seen the specter of bankruptcy before her eyes at his incomprehensible entrance. She shuddered and regained her self-control with a sigh, closing her wrapper more tightly over the disarray at her breast, as if suddenly aware of impropriety in the presence of this man who had entered her rooms after years.

"Sit down!" he said, straddling a chair and resting his arms on the back. "Clara, I am very--I am exceedingly unhappy!"

At the sound of his voice, more than from the authority in his manner, her alarm flashed up anew. She seated herself hesitatingly, scenting instinctively the approach of some formless danger. For a second she had a grotesque thought, caused by the sudden irruption on her cherished privacy, that he was going to ask her to surrender her own apartment and return to his.

"Well, well! What is it?" she asked, finally prepared to resist such brutality.

"Clara, I want my liberty!"

She relaxed a little. His liberty? She had never for a moment opposed that!

"This life I am leading is a ghastly mockery! I want it to end! I want to be able to lead my own life. I want a divorce!"

She rose in her seat, stretched out her hand and stammered:

"What?"

"I have come to tell you that I am resolved to divorce!"

"Divorce!"

All at once she fell back, limp and swooning, her head fallen forward on her breast. He rose, searched among the bottles, found smelling-salts, and methodically, not quite convinced, held them to her nostrils. Then, when she started, he placed the bottle on her lap and resumed his seat.

Her first emotion, on returning from the dizziness which had not been altogether a.s.sumed, was one of profound astonishment. After almost twenty years of married life, when she felt the completest security, when her life had run smoothest along the roads she herself had directed, all at once everything was threatened, without her being able to perceive at what point she had committed an error.

"You said--divorce?" she said weakly, staring at him.

"Yes! I have come to ask you to make no opposition, if I make whatever provision you desire for yourself."

Before the detail of his manner she could no longer cherish any doubt.

She became suddenly the woman of astuteness and cunning that she really was, gathering every energy to ward off the blow.

"You are not serious! It is impossible that you can be serious!" she began. She rose quickly, and gliding to the door, a.s.sured herself that Lucille was not eavesdropping.

"I never was more serious in my life!"

"Then let me say right here--and I will never change," she said, returning defiantly,--"I am Mrs. Ma.s.singale. That is my name; that is my position in the world. I will never surrender it. I will never, never consent to a divorce, on any grounds whatsoever!"

"Let us discuss!" he said quietly, resolved to push the matter no further than the statement of intention, and, above all, to preserve his self-respect.

"Discuss? There is nothing to discuss!" she cried, with rising anger.

"What have you to reproach me with? I have been a faithful wife all my married life. I have never made you ridiculous; I have never dishonored your name! Of how many women can you say the same in our world? I have run your house for you, and I have let you go your way, lead your life, do as you pleased, without complaint! And now, I am the one to be sacrificed? Never! You may have your idea of marriage. I have mine! I regard it as a holy sacrament that nothing can divide but death!"

"Clara, I warn you," he said quietly, "that the matter is too serious for scenes. I am fully resolved!"

"So am I!"

"May I ask you what our marriage has been?" he said, growing angry in spite of himself. "Yes, I believe in all you say, when marriage is a marriage! But when it is simply a convenient legal phrase to yoke together two human beings who have not the slightest interest in common in the world--"

"What?"

"My dear Clara," he said icily, "let me say a few plain words to you! We have lived twenty years together as you have wished it and as I have agreed. This house might be a hotel, and we pa.s.sing guests, for all the marriage there has been to it! Let's go back! You married me for money and position!"

"Harold! I--"

"Don't lie!" he said, forced at last into the inevitable brutality of matrimonial discussion. "You never loved me! You loved what I had to give you! Come, you're not going to pretend, now, that there ever was a question of love in it? But then I thought so! You were very clever!

More, you even made me believe--you, a young girl--that you loved me pa.s.sionately, that you were capable of pa.s.sion! You succeeded, as you intended, in carrying me off my feet!"

She looked at him, incapable of retort, overwhelmed with shame. She had never believed, in all these years, that he had comprehended this.

"Afterward I discovered the truth!" he continued. "I found I had united myself fatuously with a perfectly cold woman, to whom I was even repulsive!"

"Harold!"

"Physically speaking!" he added. "Who was cunningly intent on pushing me out of the way, and building up a hollow, conventionally brilliant, social life of her own. I ended by shrugging my shoulders and taking what I could out of the world in an amused, dilettante way. Every word I say is true! And now, when at forty-five I have the chance to live the life you denied me, you would stop me by any such mummery as the sacredness of this marriage! What? You would prevent me now when I come to you gently, quietly, and say to you: 'I love, I want to live, I want to be free from a bond that is nothing to you, to know what is real'--when I ask you to give me a chance to find in another what you scorn to give!"

"But you speak only of the physical!" she cried, aghast.

"No; I speak of the difference between the living and the dead!" he cried pa.s.sionately. "I speak of a woman who, when she is in your arms, clings to you and cries out words of love, whose eyes shine with your coming, who listens for your step, who doesn't hide behind prudery, but adores you as a living, throbbing human being, who is not ashamed of her love, who is natural, whose lips have kisses and whose arms seize you to her, who has youth, fire, life!"

"But you are mad, infatuated! You don't know what you are saying!" she cried, recoiling in terror. "But then, you wish to marry again!"

"Again? No! I want a real marriage!" he cried.

There was a pause, during which he brought himself back to calm, and she rapidly ran over in her mind the possible woman in her own set who might have thus awakened him.

"Clara, do not let us lose our sense of dignity," he said solemnly. "I do not expect you to answer to-night."

"I will never consent!" she cried, flaring up.

"I don't expect your answer to-night," he repeated slowly. "I shall return here to-morrow afternoon at four. By that time you will have reflected; you will perceive the monstrous iniquity of keeping me from a happiness that is perfectly indifferent to you. Moreover, I will make any settlement on you that you indicate. You will probably realize by that time that nothing in your mode of living need be changed; this house shall be yours; all that is sacrificed is a little vanity, the public recognition of a loss that has never meant anything to you!"

"Wait!" she said, with a rapid calculation. "Do I know the woman? Is it one of my friends?"

"It is not! It is some one, a young girl, from an entirely different world," he replied, and went out.

She remained embattled, and yet with the hovering sense of defeat, striving to explain the catastrophe.

"Ah, if I had had a child this never could have happened!" she cried all at once, striking her forehead.