STERLING.  O God! to have your love back!

BLANCHE.  You can’t breathe life back into a dead thing; how different the world would be if one could!

STERLING.  You can bring back life to the drowned; perhaps your love is only drowned in the sorrow I’ve caused.

BLANCHE. [Smiles sadly and shakes her head; the smile dies away.] Life to me then was like a glorious staircase, and I mounted happy step after step led by your hand till everything seemed to culminate on the day of our wedding.  You men don’t, can’t realize, what that service means to a girl.  In those few moments she parts from all that have cherished her, made her life, and gives her whole self, her love, her body, and even her soul sometimes—­for love often overwhelms us women—­to the man who, she believes, wants, starves, for her gifts.  All that a woman who marries for love feels at the altar I tell you a man can’t understand!  You treated this gift of mine, Dick, like a child does a Santa Claus plaything—­for a while you were never happy away from it, then you grew accustomed to it, then you broke it, and now you have even lost the broken pieces!

STERLING. [Comes to her, growing more and more determined.] I will find them, and put them together again.

BLANCHE. [Again smiles sadly and shakes her head.] First we made of every Tuesday a festival—­our wedding anniversary.  After a while we kept the twenty-eighth of every month!  The second year you were satisfied with the twenty-eighth of April only, and last year you forgot the day altogether.  And yet what a happy first year it was!

STERLING.  Ah, you see I did make you happy once!

BLANCHE.  Blessedly happy!  Our long silences in those days were not broken by an oath and a fling out of the room.  Oh, the happiness it means to a wife to see it is hard for her husband to leave her in the morning, and to be taken so quickly—­even roughly—­into his arms at night that she knows he has been longing to come back to her.  Nothing grew tame that first year.  And at its end I climbed to the highest step I had reached yet, when you leaned over my bed and cried big man’s tears, the first I’d ever seen you cry, and kissed me first, and then little Richard lying on my warm arm, and said, “God bless you, little mother.” [There is a pause. BLANCHE cries softly a moment. STERLING is silent, ashamed.  Again she turns upon him, rousing herself, but with a voice broken with emotion.] And what a bad father you’ve been to that boy!

STERLING.  I didn’t mean to!  That’s done, that’s past, but Richard’s my boy.  I’ll make him proud of me, somehow!  I’ll win your love back—­you’ll see!

[BLANCHE is about to speak in remonstrance, but stops because of the entrance of LEONARD. He brings a small chemist’s box of tablets in an envelope and a glass of water on a small silver tray.