“To the Club,” I said.
My room was ready, my personal belongings, my clothes had been laid out, my photographs were on the dressing-table. I took up, mechanically, the evening newspaper, but I could not read it; I thought of Maude, of the children, memories flowed in upon me,—a flood not to be dammed.... Presently the club valet knocked at my door. He had a dinner card.
“Will you be dining here, sir?” he inquired.
I went downstairs. Fred Grierson was the only man in the dining-room.
“Hello, Hugh,” he said, “come and sit down. I hear your wife’s gone abroad.”
“Yes,” I answered, “she thought she’d try it instead of the South Shore this summer.”
Perhaps I imagined that he looked at me queerly. I had made a great deal of money out of my association with Grierson, I had valued very highly being an important member of the group to which he belonged; but to-night, as I watched him eating and drinking greedily, I hated him even as I hated myself. And after dinner, when he started talking with a ridicule that was a thinly disguised bitterness about the Citizens Union and their preparations for a campaign I left him and went to bed.
Before a week had passed my painful emotions had largely subsided, and with my accustomed resiliency I had regained the feeling of self-respect so essential to my happiness. I was free. My only anxiety was for Nancy, who had gone to New York the day after my last talk with her; and it was only by telephoning to her house that I discovered when she was expected to return.... I found her sitting beside one of the open French windows of her salon, gazing across at the wooded hills beyond the Ashuela. She was serious, a little pale; more exquisite, more desirable than ever; but her manner implied the pressure of control, and her voice was not quite steady as she greeted me.
“You’ve been away a long time,” I said.
“The dressmakers,” she answered. Her colour rose a little. “I thought they’d never get through.”
“But why didn’t you drop me a line, let me know when you were coming?” I asked, taking a chair beside her, and laying my hand on hers. She drew it gently away.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking it all over—what we’re doing. It doesn’t seem right, it seems terribly wrong.”
“But I thought we’d gone over all that,” I replied, as patiently as I could. “You’re putting it on an old-fashioned, moral basis.”
“But there must be same basis,” she urged. “There are responsibilities, obligations—there must be!—that we can’t get away from. I can’t help feeling that we ought to stand by our mistakes, and by our bargains; we made a choice—it’s cheating, somehow, and if we take this—what we want—we shall be punished for it.”
“But I’m willing to be punished, to suffer, as I told you. If you loved me—”