He winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye.

“Are you as sorry as all that?” he began at length conscious of the flatness of his voice.

“Sorry—­sorry?  I’m—­I’m—­” She snatched her hand away, and went on weeping.

“But, Undine—­dearest—­bye and bye you’ll feel differently—­I know you will!”

“Differently?  Differently?  When?  In a year?  It takes a year—­a whole year out of life!  What do I care how I shall feel in a year?”

The chill of her tone struck in.  This was more than a revolt of the nerves:  it was a settled, a reasoned resentment.  Ralph found himself groping for extenuations, evasions—­anything to put a little warmth into her!  “Who knows?  Perhaps, after all, it’s a mistake.”

There was no answering light in her face.  She turned her head from him wearily.

“Don’t you think, dear, you may be mistaken?”

“Mistaken?  How on earth can I be mistaken?”

Even in that moment of confusion he was struck by the cold competence of her tone, and wondered how she could be so sure.

“You mean you’ve asked—­you’ve consulted—?” The irony of it took him by the throat.  They were the very words he might have spoken in some miserable secret colloquy—­the words he was speaking to his wife!

She repeated dully:  “I know I’m not mistaken.”

There was another long silence.  Undine lay still, her eyes shut, drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand.  The other lay cold in Ralph’s clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking:  the sense of the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general unnecessary disorganization of their lives.

“That’s all you feel, then?” he asked at length a little bitterly, as if to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too.  He stood up and moved away.  “That’s all?” he repeated.

“Why, what else do you expect me to feel?  I feel horribly ill, if that’s what you want.”  He saw the sobs trembling up through her again.

“Poor dear—­poor girl...I’m so sorry—­so dreadfully sorry!”

The senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her.  He knew it by the quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water before the coming of the wind.  She turned about on him and jumped to her feet.

“Sorry—­you’re sorry?  You’re sorry?  Why, what earthly difference will it make to you?” She drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from her sides.  “Look at me—­see how I look—­how I’m going to look!  You won’t hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see yourself in the glass!  Your life’s going on just as usual!  But what’s mine going to be for months and months?  And just as I’d been to all this bother—­fagging