“Instead of going off to one of those thousand-dollar-a-minute doctors, let me prescribe for you,” he said.  “I’ve handled some nervous men in my time, and I guess nervous women aren’t much different.  You’ve had these little attacks before, and they blow over—­don’t they?  Wing owes me a vacation.  If I do say it myself, there are not five men in New York who would have pulled off this deal for him.  Now the proposition I was going to make to you is this:  that we get cosey in a cabin de luxe on that German boat, hire an automobile on the other side, and do up Europe.  It’s a sort of a handicap never to have been over there.”

“Oh, you’re making it very hard for me, Howard,” she cried.  “I might have known that you couldn’t understand, that you never could understand—­why I am going away.  I’ve lived with you all this time, and you do not know me any better than you know—­the scrub-woman.  I’m going away from you—­forever.”

In spite of herself, she ended with an uncontrollable sob.

“Forever!” he repeated, but he continued to smoke and to look at her without any evidences of emotion, very much as though he had received an ultimatum in a business transaction.  And then there crept into his expression something of a complacent pity that braced her to continue.  “Why?” he asked.

“Because—­because I don’t love you.  Because you don’t love me.  You don’t know what love is—­you never will.”

“But we’re married,” he said.  “We get along all right.”

“Oh, can’t you see that that makes it all the worse!” she cried.  “I can stand it no longer.  I can’t live with you—­I won’t live with you.  I’m of no use to you—­you’re sufficient unto yourself.  It was all a frightful mistake.  I brought nothing into your life, and I take nothing out of it.  We are strangers—­we have always been so.  I am not even your housekeeper.  Your whole interest in life is in your business, and you come home to read the newspapers and to sleep!  Home!  The very word is a mockery.  If you had to choose between me and your business you wouldn’t hesitate an instant.  And I—­I have been starved.  It isn’t your fault, perhaps, that you don’t understand that a woman needs something more than dinner-gowns and jewels and—­and trips abroad.  Her only possible compensation for living with a man is love.  Love—­and you haven’t the faintest conception of it.  It isn’t your fault, perhaps.  It’s my fault for marrying you.  I didn’t know any better.”

She paused with her breast heaving.  He rose and walked over to the fireplace and flicked his ashes into it before he spoke.  His calmness maddened her.

“Why didn’t you say something about this before?” he asked.

“Because I didn’t know it—­I didn’t realize it—­until now.”

“When you married me,” he went on, “you had an idea that you were going to live in a house on Fifth Avenue with a ballroom, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Honora.  “I do not say I am not to blame.  I was a fool.  My standards were false.  In spite of the fact that my aunt and uncle are the most unworldly people that ever lived—­perhaps because of it—­I knew nothing of the values of life.  I have but one thing to say in my defence.  I thought I loved you, and that you could give me—­what every woman needs.”