“You are a deuced good-looking woman, I’ll say that for you, Honora,” he admitted.
“Thanks,” she answered, mockingly, and put her hands behind her back. “If I had only known you were going to settle down in Rivington and get fat and bald and wear dressing gowns and be a bear, I never should have married you—never, never, never! Oh, how young and simple and foolish I was! And the magnificent way you talked about New York, and intimated that you were going to conquer the world. I believed you. Wasn’t I a little idiot not—to know that you’d make for a place like this and dig a hole and stay in it, and let the world go hang?”
He laughed, though it was a poor attempt. And she read in his eyes, which had not left her face, that he was more or less disturbed.
“I treat you pretty well, don’t I, Honora?” he asked. There was an amorous, apologetic note in his voice that amused her, and reminded her of the honeymoon. “I give you all the money you want or rather—you take it,—and I don’t kick up a row, except when the market goes to pieces—”
“When you act as though we’d have to live in Harlem—which couldn’t be much worse,” she interrupted. “And you stay in town all day and have no end of fun making money,—for you like to make money, and expect me to amuse myself the best part of my life with a lot of women who don’t know enough to keep thin.”
He laughed again, but still uneasily. Honora was still smiling.
“What’s got into you?” he demanded. “I know you don’t like Rivington, but you never broke loose this way before.”
“If you stay here,” said Honora, with a new firmness, “it will be alone. I can’t see what you want with a wife, anyway. I’ve been thinking you over lately. I don’t do anything for you, except to keep getting you cooks—and anybody could do that. You don’t seem to need me in any possible way. All I do is to loiter around the house and read and play the piano, or go to New York and buy clothes for nobody to look at except strangers in restaurants. I’m worth more than that. I think I’ll get married again.”
“Great Lord, what are you talking about?” he exclaimed when he got his breath.
“I think I’ll take a man next time,” she continued calmly, “who has something to him, some ambition. The kind of man I thought I was getting when I took you only I shouldn’t be fooled again. Women remarry a good deal in these days, and I’m beginning to see the reason why. And the women who have done it appear to be perfectly happy—much happier than they were at first. I saw one of them at Lily Dallam’s this afternoon. She was radiant. I can’t see any particular reason why a woman should be tied all her life to her husband’s apron strings—or whatever he wears —and waste the talents she has. It’s wicked, when she might be the making of some man who is worth something, and who lives somewhere.”
Her husband got up.