"Oh, you're making it very hard for me, Howard," she cried. "I might have
known that you couldn't understand, that you never could understand--why
I am going away. I've lived with you all this time, and you do not know
me any better than you know--the scrub-woman. I'm going away from
you--forever."

In spite of herself, she ended with an uncontrollable sob.

"Forever!" he repeated, but he continued to smoke and to look at her
without any evidences of emotion, very much as though he had received an
ultimatum in a business transaction. And then there crept into his
expression something of a complacent pity that braced her to continue.
"Why?" he asked.

"Because--because I don't love you. Because you don't love me. You don't
know what love is--you never will."

"But we're married," he said. "We get along all right."

"Oh, can't you see that that makes it all the worse!" she cried. "I can
stand it no longer. I can't live with you--I won't live with you. I'm of
no use to you--you're sufficient unto yourself. It was all a frightful
mistake. I brought nothing into your life, and I take nothing out of it.
We are strangers--we have always been so. I am not even your housekeeper.
Your whole interest in life is in your business, and you come home to
read the newspapers and to sleep! Home! The very word is a mockery. If
you had to choose between me and your business you wouldn't hesitate an
instant. And I--I have been starved. It isn't your fault, perhaps, that
you don't understand that a woman needs something more than dinner-gowns
and jewels and--and trips abroad. Her only possible compensation for
living with a man is love. Love--and you haven't the faintest conception
of it. It isn't your fault, perhaps. It's my fault for marrying you. I
didn't know any better."

She paused with her breast heaving. He rose and walked over to the
fireplace and flicked his ashes into it before he spoke. His calmness
maddened her.

"Why didn't you say something about this before?" he asked.

"Because I didn't know it--I didn't realize it--until now."

"When you married me," he went on, "you had an idea that you were going
to live in a house on Fifth Avenue with a ballroom, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Honora. "I do not say I am not to blame. I was a fool. My
standards were false. In spite of the fact that my aunt and uncle are the
most unworldly people that ever lived--perhaps because of it--I knew
nothing of the values of life. I have