space seemed to blow in like
sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of
emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of
hope. I felt alone, terribly alone, in a world over which the last
fire had swept and the last rains had fallen. My throat tightened and
my eyes smarted from the wave of self-pity which washed through my
body. It angered me, ridiculously, to think that I was going to break
down at such a time.

But the more I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was
something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my
instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife
of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it
epochally shut after me. But modern life never quite lives up to its
fiction. And we are never quite free, we women who have given our
hostages to fortune, to do as we wish. We have lives other than our
own to think about.

"But it's all been so--so _dishonest_!" I cried out, stopping myself
in the middle of a gesture which might have seemed like wringing my
hands.

That, apparently, gave Dinky-Dunk something to get his teeth into. The
neutral look went out of his eye, to be replaced by a fortifying stare
of enmity.

"I don't know as it's any more dishonest than the long-distance brand
of the same thing!"

I knew, at once, what he meant. He meant Peter. He meant poor old
Peter Ketley, whose weekly letter, year in and year out, came as
regular as clockwork to Casa Grande. Those letters came to my son
Dinkie, though it couldn't be denied they carried many a cheering word
and many a companionable message to Dinkie's mother. But it brought me
up short, to think that my own husband would try to play cuttle-fish
with a clean-hearted and a clean-handed man like Peter. The wave that
went through my body, on this occasion, was one of rage. I tried to
say something, but I couldn't. The lion of my anger had me down, by
this time, with his paw on my breast. The power of speech was
squeezed out of my carcass. I could only stare at my husband with a
denuding and devastating stare of incredulity touched with disgust, of
abhorrence skirting dangerously close along the margins of hate. And
he stared back, with morose and watchful defiance on his face.

Heaven only knows how it would have ended, if that tableau hadn't gone
smash, with a sudden offstage clatter and thump and cry which reminded
me there were more people i