He had been derelict.  He didn’t pretend to evade that.  He could have forgiven her reproaches; welcomed them.  But thanks to March, she had nothing to reproach him for The presence of a man she had known a matter of weeks obliterated past years like the writing on a child’s slate.  He tried to erect an active resentment against the composer.  Didn’t all his troubles go back to the day the man had come, to tune the drawing-room piano?  First Paula and then Mary.

None of this was very real and he knew it.  There was an underlying stratum of his consciousness that this didn’t get down to at all, which, when it managed to get a word in, labeled it mere petulance, a childish attempt to find solace for his hurts in building up a grievance, a whole fortress of grievances to take shelter in against the bombardment of facts.

Was this the quality of his bitter four days’ quarrel with Paula?  Was the last accusation she had hurled at him last night before she shut herself in her room, a fact?  “Of course, I’m jealous of Mary,” she had acknowledged furiously when he charged her with it.  “You don’t care anything about me except for your pleasure.  Down there in Tryon, when you didn’t want that, you got rid of me and sent for Mary instead.  If that weren’t true, you wouldn’t have been so anxious all these years that I shouldn’t have a child.”

No, that wasn’t a fact, though it could be twisted into looking like one.  If he had refrained from urging motherhood upon her, if he’d given her the benefit of his special knowledge, didn’t her interest in her career as a singer establish the presumption that it was her wish rather than his that they were following.  Had she ever said she’d like to have a baby?  Or even hinted?

He pulled himself up.  There was no good going over that again.

He bathed and shaved and dressed himself in fresh clothes, operations which had been perforce omitted at the cottage this morning in favor of his departure without arousing Paula. (He’d slept, or rather lain awake, upon the hammock in the veranda.) When he came down-stairs he found Pete’s wife already in the kitchen, gave her directions about his breakfast and then from force of habit, thought of his morning paper.  The delivery of it had been discontinued, of course, for the months the house was closed, so he walked down to Division Street to get one.

He had got his mind into a fairly quiescent state by then which made the trick it played when he first caught sight of the great stacks of Tribunes and Heralds on the corner news-stand all the more terrifying.  It had the force of an hallucination; as if in the head-lines he actually saw the word suicide in thick black letters.  And his daughter’s name underneath.

He had managed, somehow, to evade that word; to refrain from putting into any words at all the peril Mary had so narrowly escaped, although the fact had hung, undisguised, between him and March during the moment they stared at each other before they went up-stairs together.  It avenged that evasion by leaping upon him now.  He bought his paper and hurried home with it under his arm, feeling as if it might still contain the news of that tragedy.