“Believe me,” she said gravely, “I couldn’t stand you.”

He bit his lip sharply.  “It’s dangerous, you know, what you’re doing.  I told you last night men are natural animals all the world over.  I shan’t stand being turned down like this for ever; it’s absurd, unnatural; it’s preposterous after we’ve been married all these years.  I tell you what you’re doing is not safe.  You’ll drive me elsewhere.”

“Make your own life,” she said, with a cheerful indifference; “I have all I want in mine.”

Osborn turned away with a sharp exclamation; and heard her door click behind her while he still stood in the corridor.

“That’s that!” he breathed hard.

The next morning he took a bag with him and in the afternoon he wired home:  “Shall not be back for dinner.”

She read the telegram, uncaring.  Two years ago it would have made her fear.  She would have trembled over it; her heart would have leapt as at a thunderbolt; she would have run to her glass and reckoned with the sallowness of her face, the little lines about her eyes, each representing little anxieties about little things; her chapped hands and her dull wits.  She would have thought of the other women, the hundreds of them, the younger, freer and fresher women who passed him by every day in the streets.  But now she smiled; she felt awfully old, experienced in reading under and between the brief message.

She mused:  “Tactics!  How funny men are!  Can he think I’ll mind?”

It occurred to her, too, that perhaps it was not tactics; perhaps he genuinely quested in other directions; perhaps, already, she had driven him elsewhere.  And still she was unmoved; she could not care.  She longed to care very deeply, tragically, to thrill to the pulse of life again, but she could not.  She even told herself that she was a little glad on his behalf and her own, if such was the solution.  As she went in to dinner, and seated herself at the solitary table, she liked it; privacy had returned to her.  This was almost like the year of her grass-widowhood.

CHAPTER XXIV

FOOL’S CAP

Osborn visited a smart flower shop when he went out to lunch and ordered carnations, a generous sheaf of them, to be sent to Miss Roselle Dates at the Piccadilly Theatre at half-past seven.  He rang up and booked a stall for himself and, later, sent the wire to his wife.

“She’s cut me loose,” he said to himself, “and that’s that.”

He lunched as he liked now, with a memory that could afford to be humorous of the five-shilling weekly limit to which he had cut himself down in the bad old days only just over a year ago.  But they were dear old days, too, when this extraordinary complication between his wife and him wasn’t even thought of....