“No, I don’t think it’s that,” she said dispassionately.  “I prefer to put it down, that part of it, to a fundamental difference of ideas.  I do not feel qualified to sit in judgment on that part of your life, although I’ll admit that many of the things you have done, in common with the men with whom you are associated, have seemed to me unjust and inconsiderate of the rights and feelings of others.  You have alienated some of your best friends.  If I were to arraign you at all, it would be on the score of heartlessness.  But I suppose it isn’t your fault, that you haven’t any heart.”

“That’s unfair,” I put in.

“I don’t wish to be unfair,” she replied.  “Only, since you ask me, I have to tell you that that is the way it seems to me.  I don’t want to introduce the question of right and wrong into this, Hugh, I’m not capable of unravelling it; I can’t put myself into your life, and see things from your point of view, weigh your problems and difficulties.  In the first place, you won’t let me.  I think I understand you, partly—­but only partly.  You have kept yourself shut up.  But why discuss it?  I have made up my mind.”

The legal aspect of the matter occurred to me.  What right had she to leave me?  I might refuse to support her.  Yet even as these thoughts came I rejected them; I knew that it was not in me to press this point.  And she could always take refuge with her father; without the children, of course.  But the very notion sickened me.  I could not bear to think of Maude deprived of the children.  I had seated myself again at the table.  I put my hand to my forehead.

“Don’t make it hard, Hugh,” I heard her say, gently.  “Believe me, it is best.  I know.  There won’t be any talk about it,—­right away, at any rate.  People will think it natural that I should wish to go abroad for the summer.  And later—­well, the point of view about such affairs has changed.  They are better understood.”

She had risen.  She was pale, still outwardly composed,—­but I had a strange, hideous feeling that she was weeping inwardly.

“Aren’t you coming back—­ever?” I cried.

She did not answer at once.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know,” and left the room abruptly....

I wanted to follow her, but something withheld me.  I got up and walked around the room in a state of mind that was near to agony, taking one of the neglected books out of the shelves, glancing at its meaningless print, and replacing it; I stirred the fire, opened the curtains and gazed out into the street and closed them again.  I looked around me, a sudden intensity of hatred seized me for this big, silent, luxurious house; I recalled Maude’s presentiment about it.  Then, thinking I might still dissuade her, I went slowly up the padded stairway—­to find her door locked; and a sense of the finality of her decision came over me.  I knew then that I could not alter it even were I to go all the lengths of abjectness.  Nor could I, I knew, have brought myself to have feigned a love I did not feel.