hat that service means
to a girl. In those few moments she parts from all that have cherished
her, made her life, and gives her whole self, her love, her body, and
even her soul sometimes--for love often overwhelms us women--to _the_
man who, she believes, wants, _starves_, for her gifts. All that a woman
who marries for love feels at the altar I tell you a _man_ can't
understand! You treated this gift of mine, Dick, like a child does a
Santa Claus plaything--for a while you were never happy away from it,
then you grew accustomed to it, then you broke it, and now you have even
lost the broken pieces!

STERLING. [_Comes to her, growing more and more determined._] I will
_find_ them, and put them together again.

BLANCHE. [_Again smiles sadly and shakes her head._] First we made of
_every Tuesday_ a festival--our wedding anniversary. After a while we
kept the twenty-eighth of _every month_! The second year you were
satisfied with the twenty-eighth of April only, and last year you forgot
the day altogether. And yet what a happy first year it was!

STERLING. Ah, you see I _did_ make you happy once!

BLANCHE. Blessedly happy! Our long silences in those days were not
broken by an oath and a fling out of the room. Oh, the happiness it
means to a wife to see it is hard for her husband to leave her in the
morning, and to be taken so quickly--even roughly--into his arms at
night that she knows he has been longing to come back to her. Nothing
grew tame that first year. And at its end I climbed to the highest step
I had reached yet, when you leaned over my bed and cried big man's
tears, the first I'd ever seen you cry, and kissed me first, and then
little Richard lying on my warm arm, and said, "God bless you, little
mother." [_There is a pause._ BLANCHE _cries softly a moment._ STERLING
_is silent, ashamed. Again she turns upon him, rousing herself, but with
a voice broken with emotion._] And what a _bad_ father you've been to
that boy!

STERLING. I didn't mean to! That's done, that's past, but Richard's my
boy. I'll make him proud of me, somehow! I'll win your love back--you'll
see!

[BLANCHE _is about to speak in remonstrance, but stops because of the
entrance of_ LEONARD. _He brings a small chemist's box of tablets in an
envelope and a glass of water on a small silver tray._

LEONARD. Your medicine, sir.

[_He puts it on the table and goes out Right._

STERLING. Thank you, thank you!

[_He takes the box of tablets