“I haven’t decided,” she repeated.

“But why—­why are you doing this?”

I would have recalled the words as soon as I had spoken them.  There was the slightest unsteadiness in her voice as she replied:—­“Is it necessary to go into that, Hugh?  Wouldn’t it be useless as well as a little painful?  Surely, going to Europe without one’s husband is not an unusual thing in these days.  Let it just be understood that I want to go, that the children have arrived at an age when it will do them good.”

I got up and began to walk up and down the room, while she watched me with a silent calm which was incomprehensible.  In vain I summoned my faculties to meet it.

I had not thought her capable of such initiative.

“I can’t see why you want to leave me,” I said at last, though with a full sense of the inadequacy of the remark, and a suspicion of its hypocrisy.

“That isn’t quite true,” she answered.  “In the first place, you don’t need me.  I am not of the slightest use in your life, I haven’t been a factor in it for years.  You ought never to have married me,—­it was all a terrible mistake.  I began to realize that after we had been married a few months—­even when we were on our wedding trip.  But I was too inexperienced—­perhaps too weak to acknowledge it to myself.  In the last few years I have come to see it plainly.  I should have been a fool if I hadn’t.  I am not your wife in any real sense of the word, I cannot hold you, I cannot even interest you.  It’s a situation that no woman with self-respect can endure.”

“Aren’t those rather modern sentiments, for you, Maude?” I said.

She flushed a little, but otherwise retained her remarkable composure.

“I don’t care whether they are ‘modern’ or not, I only know that my position has become impossible.”

I walked to the other end of the room, and stood facing the carefully drawn curtains of the windows; fantastically, they seemed to represent the impasse to which my mind had come.  Did she intend, ultimately, to get a divorce?  I dared not ask her.  The word rang horribly in my ears, though unpronounced; and I knew then that I lacked her courage, and the knowledge was part of my agony.

I turned.

“Don’t you think you’ve overdrawn things, Maude exaggerated them?  No marriages are perfect.  You’ve let your mind dwell until it has become inflamed on matters which really don’t amount to much.”

“I was never saner, Hugh,” she replied instantly.  And indeed I was forced to confess that she looked it.  That new Maude I had seen emerging of late years seemed now to have found herself; she was no longer the woman I had married,—­yielding, willing to overlook, anxious to please, living in me.

“I don’t influence you, or help you in any way.  I never have.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” I protested.