He did not move.

“Don’t stop me,” she pleaded.  “Don’t make it any harder than it is.  Let me take with me the consolation of a decent life together—­a decent life decently severed.”

He made one last appeal—­he opened his arms wide to her.

She shrank back with a shudder, crying out that he should spare her her own contempt—­that he should leave her the power to seek peace—­and her voice had such a tone of terror, as she recoiled from him, that he felt how powerless any protest would be.

He stepped aside.

Without looking at him she quickly opened the door and passed out.

* * * * *

The Divorcee nervously rolled up her manuscript.

The usual laugh was not forthcoming.  No one dared.  Men can’t rough-house that kind of a woman.

After a moment’s silence the Critic spoke up.  “You were right to read that story.  It is not the sort of thing that lends itself to narrating.  Of course you might have acted it out, but you were wise not to.”

“I can’t help it—­got to say it,” said the Journalist:  “What a horrid woman!”

The Divorcee looked at him in amazement.  “How can you say that?” she exclaimed.  “I thought I had made her so reasonable.  Just what all women ought to be, and what none of us are.”

“Thank God for that,” said the Journalist.  “I’d as lief live in a world created and run by George Bernard Shaw as in one where women were like that.”

“Come, come,” interrupted the Doctor, who had been eyeing her profile with a curious half amused expression, all through the reading:  “Don’t let us get on that subject to-night.  A story is a story.  You have asked, and you have received.  None of you seem to really like any story but your own, and I must confess that among us, we are putting forth a strange baggage.”

“On the contrary,” said the Critic, “I think we are doing pretty well for a crowd of amateurs.”

“You are not an amateur,” laughed the Journalist, “and yours was the worst yet.”

“I deny it,” said the Critic.  “Mine had real literary quality, and a very dramatic climax.”

“Oh, well, if death is dramatic—­perhaps.  You are the only one up to date who has killed his heroine.”

“No story is finished until the heroine is dead,” said the Journalist.  “This woman,—­I’ll bet she had another romance.”

“Did she?” asked the Critic of the Divorcee, who was still nervously rolling her manuscript in both hands.

“I don’t know.  How should I?  And if I did I shouldn’t tell you.  It isn’t a true story, of course.”  And she rose from her chair and walked away into the moonlight.

“Do you mean to say,” ejaculated the Violinist, who admired her tremendously, “that she made that up in the imagination she carries around under that pretty fluffy hair?  I’d rather that it were true—­that she had picked it up somewhere.”