" she said, a frown lowering over her closed eyes and pressing
two fingers against each temple. "Don't talk."

He walked to the window in a state of great perturbation, stood pulling
inward his lips and staring down into the now brilliantly lighted flow of
Broadway. Turned into the room with short, hasty strides, then back again.
Came to confront her.

"Aw, now, Millie--Millie--" Stood regarding her, chewing backward and
forward along his fingertips. "You--you see for yourself, Millie, what's
dead can't be made alive--now, can it?"

She nodded, acquiescing, her lips bitterly wry.

"My lawyer, Millie, he'll fix it, alimony and all, so you won't--"

"O God!"

"Suppose I just slip away easy, Millie, and let him fix up things so it'll
be easiest for us both. Send the boy down to see me to-morrow. He's
old enough and got enough sense to have seen things coming. He knows.
Suppose--I just slip out easy, Millie, for--for--both of us. Huh, Millie?"

She nodded again, her lips pressed back against outburst.

"If ever there was a good little woman, Millie, and one that deserves
better than me, it's--"

"Don't!" she cried. "Don't--don't--don't!"

"I--"

"Go--quick--now!"

He hesitated, stood regarding her there in the chair, eyes squeezed closed
like Iphigenia praying for death when exiled in Tauris.

"Millie--I--"

"Go!" she cried, the wail clinging to her lips.

He felt round for his hat, his gaze obscured behind the shining glasses,
tiptoed out round the archipelago of too much furniture, groped for the
door-handle, turning it noiselessly, and stood for the instant looking back
at her bathed in the rosy light and seated upright like a sleeping Ariadne;
opened the door to a slit that closed silently after him.

She sat thus for three hours after, the wail still uppermost on the
silence.

At ten o'clock, with a gust that swayed the heavy drapes, her son burst in
upon the room, his stride kicking the door before he opened it. Six feet in
his gymnasium shoes, and with a ripple of muscle beneath the well-fitting,
well-advertised Campus Coat for College Men, he had emerged from the three
years into man's complete estate, which, at nineteen, is that patch of
territory at youth's feet known as "the world." Gray eyed, his dark lashes
long enough to threaten to curl, the lean line of his jaw squaring after
the manner of America's fondest version of her manhood, he was already in
danger of fond illusions and fond momma