“Nonsense!  If we only got along together as well as we seem to from the outside it wouldn’t be bad at all.  But you’re too severe.  You seem to think a man should be perfect.  Well, none of us are, and I’m no worse than the majority.  Why, I know lots of fellows who forget themselves and do things they shouldn’t, but they don’t mean anything by it.  They have wives and homes to go to when it’s all over.  But have I?  You’re as glad to see me as if I had smallpox.  Maybe we’ve made a mess of things, but married life isn’t what young girls think it is, A wife must learn to give and take.”

“I’ve given.  What have I taken?” she asked him in a voice that quivered.

Ed made an impatient gesture.  “Oh, don’t be so literal!  I mean that, since we’re man and wife, it’s up to you to be a little more—­broad-gauge in your views.”

“In other words, you want me to ignore your conduct.  Is that it?  I’m afraid we can’t argue that, Ed.”

Within the last few days Austin’s mind had registered a number of new impressions, and at this moment he realized that his wife was undoubtedly the most attractive woman physically he had ever known.  Of course she was cold, but she had not always been so.  He had chilled her; he had seen the fire die year by year, but now the memory of her as she had once been swept over him, bringing a renewed appreciation of her charms.  His recent dissipation had told upon him as heavily as a siege of sickness, and this evening he was in that fatuous, sentimental mood which comes with convalescence, Having no fault to find with himself, and feeling merely a selfish desire to make more pleasant his life at Las Palmas, he undertook to bend Alaire to his will.

“All right; don’t let’s try to argue it,” he laughed, with what he considered an admirable show of magnanimity.  “I hate arguments, anyhow; I’d much rather have a goodnight kiss.”

But when he stooped over her Alaire held him off and turned her head.  “No!” she said.

“You haven’t kissed me for—­”

“I don’t wish to kiss you.”

“Don’t be silly,” he insisted.  This suggestion of physical resistance excited his love of conquest and awoke something like the mood of a lover—­such a lover as a man like Ed could be.  For a moment he felt as if Alaire were some other woman than his wife, a woman who refused and yet half expected to be overcome; therefore he laughed self-consciously and repeated, “Come now, I want a kiss.”

Alaire thrust him back strongly, and he saw that her face had whitened.  Oddly enough, her stubbornness angered him out of all reason, and he began a harsh remonstrance.  But he halted when she cried: 

“Wait!  I must tell you something, Ed. It’s all over, and has been for a long time.  We’re going to end it.”

“End it?”

“We can’t go on living together.  Why should we?”

“So?  Divorce?  Is that it?”

Alaire nodded.