"Oh, I'd like to pretend. But I've changed, too. I suppose you can't marry without being changed. A woman who loses her husband looks silly. But she needn't if she doesn't feel it. You can't pretend. Neither can I. You've taught me that. We've failed where nearly everybody else fails, but we admit it. What's the good of pitching good life after bad? It's no one's business but our own. They'll talk. Let them talk."
He hardly heard what she said. He was weary of her voice droning on and on.
"If it is the end," he muttered, "then there is no more to be said."
He walked round to Professor Smallman's. He had no notion of the time. Mrs. Smallman admitted him, saw that something was wrong, showed him into the study, and left him. He stood leaning against the doorpost. The Professor was sitting in his great chair with a cigar in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other.
"Good evening," said René. "I have left my wife."
Down went the Professor's legs, round came his head out of the great chair:
"I just walked round to tell you. I don't know why."
"But, my dear fellow, what on earth-- Not two years."
"I say. Is she? Would you like Freda to go round?"
"No. She is quite calm. It's finished. It's she who said it. It never began."
"Come, come. Sit down. You'd better sleep here to-night."
"No, thanks. I don't want to see you ever again."
The Professor hurried out of the room, and René could hear him in the hall talking eagerly to his wife. He was seized with a dreary impatience of these good people, with their unfailing kindness. He knew perfectly well that in a moment they would return, husband and wife, _the_ husband and wife, and throw him scraps of their happiness for comfort and persuasion, while with their exchange of glances they would bar him out. No. That was intolerable. He stepped to the French window, opened it, and walked out, round the house and through the garden into the street.
Another false move checked; another false relationship ended.
He slept that night at the Denmark, lied and enjoyed lying to Mr. Sherman, saying that his wife was away and he had lost his key and could not wake the servants. He sat in his room at the Denmark feeling at peace and very confident, until his father came. Then he sat with the boon company, told them one or two stories that he was able to remember from the stock of the Common Room, told them heavily, dully, so that they gained in comicality and roused laughter. His father seemed to him rather contemptible. He enjoyed his own old jests as much as his audience, and that was displeasing to René's fastidious mood.