is sphere of
life a woman wants to go, it is a man's mere duty to open the doors,
open the windows, run ahead, get a divorce and bring it back to her on
a salver. Had he been sober he would have realized that. He would have
recognized too the propriety of Fanny's frank request. After little
more than five months of marriage it was perhaps precipitate. Yet
considered simply as a request it was, in the world in which he moved,
more common than the reverse.

Ordinarily he would have realized that. What is more, he would have
realized that what Fanny had said was true. They were not suited for
each other. When people are not so suited it is best that they should
separate. But people that have bowed when they met might just as well
bow when they part. In the life known as polite big words and little
threats have long since gone out of fashion.

All of which ordinarily Annandale would have known. He was essentially
urbane, of a nature far more inclined to inaction than anger.
Ordinarily, he would have accepted the situation, without joy, no
doubt, but certainly without raising the roof. Whereupon, having so
accepted it, he would have turned in and gone to bed.

But alcohol plays strange tricks. It affects manners and memories. It
affects, too, the imagination. Annandale was drunk. The Yellow Fay
that lurks in liquor awoke in him the manger dog. He told himself that
he was being robbed. And of what? The wife of his bosom! And by whom?
His nearest friend! The outrage and the villainy of that loomed, or
rather, the Yellow Fay aiding, seemed to loom so monstrously, that,
beside it, the disasters of the Street dwindled into nothing, lost in
the sense of this wrong.

It was damnable, he decided.

Putting a hand in a pocket his fingers encountered a string of pearls.
It was not that which he was seeking. Besides, he had forgotten them.
But finding them there it occurred to him that he ought to restore
them at once. Circling the park he entered Irving Place and rang at
Sylvia's door.

There, instead of the usual if brief delay, the door opened at once.
Orr was coming out. Beyond in the hall Sylvia stood. Orr looked at
Annandale, wondering what the dickens he was after. But Annandale
brushed by. Orr passed on. Annandale entered the hall.

As the door closed the light revealed to Sylvia what Orr in the
semi-obscurity of the stoop had not observed and which, had he
observed, would, in view of an anterior episode, have induced h