The door was locked.

I heard a movement inside the room and in a moment I hurried from the salon into the corridor, intending to enter by another door.  As I was about to do so I heard the lock turned back by a cautious hand within.  Then I swung the door open and boldly entered the room.

Nobody was there except my husband.

But I was just in time to catch the sound of rustling skirts in the adjoining apartment and to see a door closed gently behind them.

I looked around.  Although the sun was shining, the blinds were down and the air was full of a rank odour of stale tobacco such as might have been brought back in people’s clothes from that shameless woman’s salon.

My husband, who had clearly been drinking, was looking at me with a half-senseless grin.  His thin hair was a little disordered.  His prominent front teeth showed hideously.  I saw that he was trying to carry things off with an air.

“This is an unexpected pleasure.  I think it must be the first time . . . the very first time that. . . .”

I felt deadly cold; I almost swooned; I could scarcely breathe, but I said: 

“Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”

“All?  What else, my dear?  I don’t understand. . . .”

“You understand quite well,” I answered, and then looking towards the door of the adjoining apartment, I said, “both of you understand.”

My husband began to laugh—­a drunken, idiotic laugh.

“Oh, you mean that . . . perhaps you imagine that. . . .”

“Listen,” I said.  “This is the end of everything between you and me.”

“The end?  Why, I thought that was long ago.  In fact I thought everything ended before it began.”

“I mean. . . .”  I knew I was faltering . . .  “I mean that I can no longer keep up the farce of being your wife.”

“Farce!” Again he laughed.  “I congratulate you, my dear.  Farce is exactly the word for it.  Our relations have been a farce ever since the day we were married, and if anything has gone wrong you have only yourself to blame for it.  What’s a man to do whose wife is no company for anybody but the saints and angels?”

His coarse ridicule cut me to the quick.  I was humiliated by the thought that after all in his own gross way my husband had something to say for himself.

Knowing I was no match for him I wanted to crawl away without another word.  But my silence or the helpless expression of my face must have been more powerful than my speech, for after a few seconds in which he went on saying in his drawling way that I had been no wife to him, and if anything had happened I had brought it on myself, he stopped, and neither of us spoke for a moment.

Then feeling that if I stayed any longer in that room I should faint, I turned to go, and he opened the door for me and bowed low, perhaps in mockery, as I passed out.

When I reached my own bedroom I was so weak that I almost dropped, and so cold that my maid had to give me brandy and put hot bottles to my feet.