“I’ll not do it,” he protested, “and I won’t let you do it, either.  Why should you smear your name and roll in the dirt and play dead to please Jeanne?  If Jeanne thinks I’m going to send you to a Raines hotel and follow you up with detectives to furnish her with a fake divorce, you can tell her I won’t.  What are they coming to?” demanded the best friend.  “What do they want?  A man gives a woman all his love, all his thoughts, gives her his name, his home; only asks to work his brains out for her, only asks to see her happy.  And she calls it ‘charity,’ calls herself a ’slave’!” The best friend kicked violently at the place where the waste-basket had been. “Give them the vote, I say,” he shouted.  “It’s all they’re good for!”

The violence of his friend did not impress Jimmie.  As he walked up-town the only part of the interview he carried with him was that there must be no scandal.  Not on his account.  If Jeanne wished it, he assured himself, in spite of the lawyer, he was willing, in the metaphor of that gentleman, to “roll in the dirt and play dead.”  “Play dead!” The words struck him full in the face.  Were he dead and out of the way, Jeanne, without a touch of scandal, could marry the man she loved.  Jimmie halted in his tracks.  He believed he saw the only possible exit.  He turned into a side street, and between the silent houses, closed for the summer, worked out his plan.  For long afterward that city block remained in his memory; the doctors’ signs on the sills, the caretakers seeking the air, the chauffeurs at the cab rank.  For hours they watched the passing and repassing of the young man, who with bent head and fixed eyes struck at the pavement with his stick.

That he should really kill himself Jimmie did not for a moment contemplate.  To him self-destruction appeared only as an offense against nature.  On his primitive, out-of-door, fox-hunting mind the ethics of suicide lay as uneasily as absinthe on the stomach of a baby.  But, he argued, by pretending he were dead, he could set Jeanne free, could save her from gossip, and could still dream of her, love her, and occupy with her, if not the same continent, the same world.

He had three problems to solve, and as he considered them he devotedly wished he might consult with a brain more clever than his own.  But an accomplice was out of the question.  Were he to succeed, everybody must be fooled; no one could share his secret.  It was “a lone game, played alone, and without my partner.”

The three problems were:  first, in order to protect his wife, to provide for the suicide a motive other than the attentions of Maddox; second, to make the suicide look like a real suicide; third, without later creating suspicion, to draw enough money from the bank to keep himself alive after he was dead.  For his suicide Jeanne must not hold herself to blame; she must not believe her conduct forced his end; above every one else, she must be persuaded that in bringing about his death she was completely innocent.  What reasons then were accepted for suicide?