“No!  No!!  No!!!” cried Henrietta, stamping on the carpet.  “We had not a word.  I have not lost my temper since we were married, mamma; I solemnly swear I have not.  I will kill myself; there is no other way.  There’s a curse on me.  I am marked out to be miserable.  He—­”

“Tut, tut!  What has happened, Henrietta?  As you have been married now nearly six weeks, you can hardly be surprised at a little tiff arising.  You are so excitable!  You cannot expect the sky to be always cloudless.  Most likely you are to blame; for Sidney is far more reasonable than you.  Stop crying, and behave like a woman of sense, and I will go to Sidney and make everything right.”

“But he’s gone, and I can’t find out where.  Oh, what shall I do?”

“What has happened?”

Henrietta writhed with impatience.  Then, forcing herself to tell her story, she answered: 

“We arranged on Monday that I should spend two days with Aunt Judith instead of going with him to Birmingham to that horrid Trade Congress.  We parted on the best of terms.  He couldn’t have been more affectionate.  I will kill myself; I don’t care about anything or anybody.  And when I came back on Wednesday he was gone, and there was this letter.”  She produced a letter, and wept more bitterly than before.

“Let me see it.”

Henrietta hesitated, but her mother took the letter from her, sat down near the window, and composed herself to read without the least regard to her daughter’s vehement distress.  The letter ran thus: 

“Monday night.

“My Dearest:  I am off—­surfeited with endearment—­to live my own life and do my own work.  I could only have prepared you for this by coldness or neglect, which are wholly impossible to me when the spell of your presence is upon me.  I find that I must fly if I am to save myself.

“I am afraid that I cannot give you satisfactory and intelligible reasons for this step.  You are a beautiful and luxurious creature:  life is to you full and complete only when it is a carnival of love.  My case is just the reverse.  Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke myself for folly and insincerity.  Before a caress has had time to cool, a strenuous revulsion seizes me:  I long to return to my old lonely ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought.  I married in an insane fit of belief that I had a share of the natural affection which carries other men through lifetimes of matrimony.  Already I am undeceived.  You are to me the loveliest woman in the world.  Well, for five weeks I have walked and tallied and dallied with the loveliest woman in the world, and the upshot is that I am flying from her, and am for a hermit’s cave until I die.  Love cannot keep possession of me:  all my strongest powers rise up against it and will not endure it.  Forgive me for writing nonsense that you won’t understand, and do not think too hardly of me.  I have been as good to you as my selfish nature allowed.  Do not seek to disturb me in the obscurity which I desire and deserve.  My solicitor will call on your father to arrange business matters, and you shall be as happy as wealth and liberty can make you.  We shall meet again—­some day.