He opened those burning lips and said in the same low voice, rough with its intensity, “You see what you have done.  You have spoken for me.  You have said at last what I have been silently and desperately calling out to you.  You know what has happened.  You have said it, it is obvious to anyone with any sense of human values.  Make an end!  Make an end!  Come away from a position where only an outworn old ideal holds you to futility and waste.  Come away where you will really live and know the fullness of life.  Come away from that false notion of duty which makes you do for the children what you know is not best for them, only because it is the traditional thing to do, only because it gives you a martyr’s crown to wear.  I don’t say anything now, as I would to any other woman in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all that you are . . .  I don’t say anything about the imbecility of keeping such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and harmonious living!  It is your birthright.  Let me give it to you.  All that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness waiting for you to create it to glorious being, all that is nothing compared to what has come to pass between us, you and me; compared to that other world of impassioned living existence that is waiting for you.  Come away from the man who is nothing more to you than the house you live in . . . nothing but a habit.”

She started at this, moving out of the stony immobility in which she gazed at him, listened to him.  She did not know that she had moved, was incapable of willing to do so.  It had been a mere reflex start as though she had been struck.  But at the sight of it, the flame in his eyes leaped up.  “No, no, no!” he cried with an insistent triumph, “he is nothing more to you than a habit.  And you are nothing more to him.  You were right, on that evening when you shrank away from the sight of the place in Italy where in your ignorant youth you made the mistake of trying to join your life to his.  There is not a breath you draw, not a turn of your head or body . . .  I know them all . . . that does not prove that he is nothing to you now.  I have seen you take a handkerchief from his pocket as you would take it from a bureau-drawer.  I have seen him set you on one side, to pass through a door, as he would set a chair on one side.  You don’t even see him any more when you look at him, and he doesn’t see you.  Whatever there may have been between you, if there was ever anything real, it is dead now, dead and buried . . . and you the most living woman who ever wore flesh and blood!  And I am a living man!  You know, I don’t need to say it, you know what happens when our looks meet.  Our looks only!  Life flares up like a torch in both of us.  You know if I but brush against your skirt, how I cannot speak!  You know how when our hands touch, every drop of blood in our two bodies burns!  You are a grown woman.  You know life as well as I do.  You know what this means.  You are no longer even a part of his life.  You are all of mine.  Look at me now.”