ed, "you may wake up to the fact that I'm
still a human being."

"I've wakened up to the fact that you're a different sort of human
being than I had thought."

"Oh, we're all very much alike, once you get our number," asserted my
husband.

"You mean men are," I amended.

"I mean that if men can't get a little warmth and color and sympathy
in the home-circle they're going to edge about until they find a
substitute for it, no matter how shoddy it may be," contended
Dinky-Dunk.

"But isn't that a hard and bitter way of writing life down to one's
own level?" I asked, trying to swallow the choke that wouldn't stay
down in my throat.

"Well, I can't see that we get much ahead by trying to sentimentalize
the situation," he said, with a gesture that seemed one of
frustration.

We sat staring at each other, and again I had the feeling of abysmal
gulfs of space intervening between us.

"Is that all you can say about it?" I asked, with a foolish little
gulp I couldn't control.

"Isn't it enough?" demanded Dinky-Dunk. And I knew that nothing was to
be gained, that night, by the foolish and futile clash of words.

_Tuesday the Twenty-Third_

I've been doing a good deal of thinking over what Dinky-Dunk said. I
have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of
mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite
understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I
can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct
under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that
will have to be faced. _My husband is no longer in love with me._
Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan
Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the
mother of his children. We still live together, and, from force of
habit, if from nothing else, go through the familiar old rites of
daily communion. He sits across the table from me when I eat, and
talks casually enough of the trivially momentous problems of the
minute, or he reads in his slippers before the fire while I do my
sewing within a spool-toss of him. But a row of invisible assegais
stand leveled between his heart and mine. A slow glacier of
green-iced indifferency shoulders in between us; and gone forever is
the wild-flower aroma of youth, the singing spirit of April, the
mysterious light that touched our world with wonder. He is merely a
man, drawing on to middl