“The days are over, Millie, when this kind of thing makes any difference.  If it was—­the mother—­it might be different, but where the father is—­to blame—­it don’t matter with the boy.  Anyways, he’s nearly of age.  I tell you, Millie, if you’ll just look at this thing sensible—­”

“I—­Let me think, let—­me—­think.”

Her tears had quieted now to little dry moans that came with regularity.  She was still swaying in her chair, eyes closed.

“You’ll get your decree, Millie, without—.”

“Don’t talk,” 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 mommas.