"Marion," he began brusquely, "I should like to speak to you."
She had been sitting with her back to the door; at his strange address of her she turned round in surprise; she looked startled when she saw his strained face.
"We've been married about six years, isn't it?"
He had come a little nearer, but remained standing. He still spoke in that rough way. She did not reply but nodded slightly, flushing.
"And now for two years we--haven't been married?"
She stiffened and there was a slight movement as if drawing back. She did not answer.
"I'm thirty-four and you're a little less than that." He paused and it was more quietly, though none the less tensely that he asked: "Is it your idea that we go through life like this?"
She was gathering together the sheets of paper on her desk. She did not speak.
"You were angry at me--disappointed. I grant you, as I did at the time, that it was a silly affair, not--not creditable. I tried to show you how little it meant, how it had--just happened. Two years have passed; we are still young people. I want to know--do you intend this to go on? Are our whole lives to be spoiled by a mere silly episode?"
She spoke then. "Mere silly episode," she said with a high little laugh, "seems rather a slight way to dispose of the fact that you were untrue to me." She folded her letter and was putting it in the envelope. It would not go in and she refolded it with hands not steady.
He did not speak until she had sealed the letter and was sitting there looking down at her hands, rubbing them a little, as if her interest was in them. "Marion," he asked, and his voice shook now, "doesn't it ever seem to you that life is too valuable to throw away like this?" She made no reply and angered by her unresponsiveness he added sharply: "It's rather dangerous, you know."
She looked up at him then. "Is this a threat?" she asked with a faint, mocking smile.
He moved angrily, starting to leave the room. "Have you no feeling?" he broke out at her. "Is this all you _want_ from life?"
She colored and retorted: "It was not the way I expected to live when I married you."
He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness. "I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh no, you don't believe in divorce--but you believe in _this_!"