“Complaisant?  It’s callousness; don’t-careness.  You mean me to understand, then, that you’ve reckoned with everything?”

“No, I don’t.  I mean you to understand that I don’t trouble to do any reckoning about you at all.”

As she uttered the words she was conscious of the brutality of them; but she was speaking truth, representing those feelings which had taken the place of love-emotions in her heart; and what else was there to say?

“I must say,” he said, “you’re candid.”

“I want to be.  If we once thoroughly understood each other we’d shake down better and go our ways in peace.  I don’t want formal separation, for the children’s sake.”

“Formal separation?  If we had that, because you refused to live with me, desertion would be constituted and I’d get the children, you know.”

“I wonder,” she said, starting.  “I should fight.”

He saw the set meditation on her face under the moonlight.

“Would there be nothing I could say?” she asked, lifting her eyes to his.  “I wonder if there’d be no countercharge ingenuity could bring?”

She did not mean what occurred to him; the things in her mind were of too untechnical a nature to find a hearing in the divorce courts; but as she asked her question suddenly his heart seemed to rock and to stand still for a space, while he shifted his eyes rapidly from hers and gazed straight out over the steering-wheel, down the hill, into the blue-white moonlit distance.

Roselle!

Who would believe his innocent tale if he stood up in that sad court which recorded the most human of all frailties, and said:  “We travelled together here and we travelled together there; and I defrayed these expenses and those expenses; and I’ve kissed her; and yes, we’ve certainly been alone in very compromising circumstances, but I ask you to believe that technically my marital honour is intact, and that I’ve been true and faithful to my wife”?

The fun and the folly which had been so worth while, so like a draught of wine on the cold journey through middle-class pauperism, now appeared stripped of their carnival trappings.  It was only folly which stared back at him now, and she had become ugly; sickening and wholly undesirable.  Folly was utter trash.  He replied to Marie in a voice so studied as to rivet her attention, asking: 

“What do you mean?”

She looked at him, and knowledge came to her, born of a swift intuition raised by his obvious difficulties.  In a flash she knew; but even while she knew, she didn’t care; it was lamentable, how dead she was.

“Oh,” she hesitated, a faint smile crossing her lips, “I mean nothing.  Please don’t suppose I wish to make your private affairs mine.”

So great was his want that she should feel, should ask and demand him to give up his secrets, that he was impelled to declare: 

“Marie, if you were to ask me, I’d tell you everything about this last year.  Every little thing.  There should be nothing kept back from you.”