The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident,—­one of those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered effort,—­and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy.  Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston.  From Boston she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o’clock train and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West.  By her schedule she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central station.

On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see Blasius.  She decided, against her custom, one might say against her principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon train the next day.  She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph Blasius, because she wished—­the old fallacy of affection!—­to “surprise” him.  She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winter night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New York.  She sent Poppas—­paler than usual with accusing scorn—­and her trunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense of being very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, she took a cab for Tenth Street.

Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key and went directly to his room.  She did not find him there.  Indeed, she found him where he should not have been at all.  There must have been a trying scene.

Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well.  By eight o’clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves.  Nobody had any breakfast.  Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her engagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation.  Blasius was left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man’s wife to look after him.  His explanation of his conduct was that he had been drinking too much.  His digression, he swore, was casual.  It had never occurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife’s magnanimity.  But it was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding, and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment.  She had never made shabby compromises, and it was too late for her to begin.  When she returned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalka alone again.  Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities were conducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced in the morning papers before her friends knew that there was the least likelihood of one.  Cressida’s concert tours had interrupted the hospitalities of the house.