“By heaven!” thought Delancey, aghast. “I’m afraid that’s what she does do. …”
“She went a little too far this morning,” said Whitestone. “I called her a name she didn’t like.”
“There’s no excuse for that,” said Delancey, curtly. “She’s a—good woman, and she’s your wife. I’m surprised, Robert.”
“So was she,” said Whitestone, “and she’s afraid now. She saw.”
“Saw—what?”
Whitestone lit another cigarette.
“She knows now what I want to do.”
“You mean you’re going to leave her?”
“Oh, no!” Whitestone answered, smiling faintly. “No sense in that. She won’t give me grounds for a divorce; she’d never let me go. And I want to be free. No. …She’s going to leave me.”
“But how—?” Delancey began, and was sorry he had begun. That smile of Whitestone’s…
He wanted to get away in a hurry, he did not want to hear any more, did not want to guess any more. …He wanted to get out of the glade, away from his friend, back into the cheerful, everyday world.
“See here, Robert!” he said. “You’re overwrought. You get along home now, and dress, and come into town. Meet me at my office, and we’ll have lunch together.”
“D’you know—” said Whitestone, slowly. “I envy you, Shawe. It’s a divine blessing, the faculty you’ve got for shutting your eyes. You’re able to live in that comfortable blindness. You’ve refused to see how it was with Rosalind and me. And you won’t see how you hate Josephine.”
“Now, look here!” said Delancey. “You’re going too far, Robert. That’s a lie.”
“You—humbug!” said Whitestone, laughing. “It’s almost a pity, to try to wake you up. You hate Josephine, and she knows it.”
“That’s a damned lie!”
“You’ve told me twice—with that solemn, anxious face of yours—that you dreamed your Josephine was dead. D’you know what that means? She does. The second time you told me, she was there. I watched her—and she knew. You were honest—in your dream. It was the death wish, Shawe.”
A peculiar sensation assailed Delancey; it was as if cold water trickled down his spine, under his skin. He resented it.
“I won’t listen any more to your raving!” he said, angrily.
“You were wishing her dead, Shawe. Wishing that jealous, domineering woman was dead, and out of your way. And that you had your freedom—and her money.”
Delancey turned on his heel and walked off.
“Wait!” cried Whitestone, laughing again. “Don’t forget that I want you to dine with me to-night. Seven o’clock.”
“I’m not coming,” said Delancey. “I don’t want to see you again, until you’re in a different frame of mind. You’ve said things…”
“Shawe, come back! You can’t leave me like this. …Shawe—I tell you I’m at the end of the tether.”
His voice sounded desperate, almost hysterical. But for once Delancey ignored an appeal. He was shaken by anger.
“He’s gone too far, this time,” he said to himself, striding along the road toward his car. “I won’t forget this in a hurry. He’s said inexcusable things. Inexcusable. I mean, making all possible allowances for his temperament and so on. …”
The wind stirred the dust in the road, the trees rustled; he slackened his pace, feeling suddenly tired, and very hot.
“It’s ridiculous,” he told himself. “I shouldn’t take it so seriously. No one ought to mind an accusation when it has no foundation at all. To tell me I ‘hate’ Josephine…Simply ridiculous. Of course, I’m no Romeo. I’m not the kind of man for one of those ‘grand passions.’ I’m too practical. But I’m as fond of Josephine as I’ve ever been of any woman in my life. She has her faults—but who hasn’t? What’s more, she’s fond of me. Very. It’s—it’s an insane thing to say that I…That she knows I…”
Something came into his mind, which made his blue eyes dilate. “You looked stealthy and horrible!” she had said, that morning. “You looked like—”
Like what? What had she been going to say?
“My God!” he said to himself, in a whisper.
CHAPTER III
The Luffs
Delancey had missed his usual train, and the one after it; the people waiting on the platform were strangers to him, not those well-known faces he was accustomed to seeing six days a week. But they were ordinary, decent, comprehensible people; he felt a great good-will toward them; he felt the relief of one waking from a nightmare to familiar surroundings. And he felt, too, the vague terror that a nightmare leaves.
“Whew!” he said to himself. “That was a—very unpleasant experience. …But fantastic, of course.”
The word pleased him.
“Fantastic,” he repeated to himself, as he boarded the train.
It seemed to dispose in a thoroughly satisfactory fashion of poor Whitestone and all he had said, it gave to the scene in the birch glade an air of unreality. The real world was this, the train, the crowds, the Grand Central Station, the subway, his desk at the office, the amiable stenographer who worked for him when he needed her.
He did not need her this morning; his business was not brisk.
“I’m going to look around for something else,” he thought. “A regular job with a salary.”
He had mentioned this once or twice to Josephine, and she had protested.
“Oh, don’t, Shawe! It’s so nice for you to have your own business. I’d hate to think of your working for someone else—being at someone’s beck and call.”
Very generous, she was. He had his own bank account, in which she deposited a check the first of every month. She never asked what he did with it, and if he said he needed a bit more, for his business, she almost always gave it. Almost always. Sometimes, when he least expected it, she would make extraordinary accusations against him, would say she knew he wanted the money to spend on some other woman. …Of course, she had her faults, like everyone else. He had faults himself. But, with the exception of a little scene now and then. …Simply nerves. …She was a high-strung girl, poor Josephine. …Well, not exactly a girl, perhaps. She admitted to being five years older than he, and sometimes he had a suspicion that it was a bit more than that. When she waked in the morning, there was a look about her eyes…
He wished he had not thought of that. He always tried to avoid looking at her until she had removed her “night cream” and applied those “toning lotions” and so on.
Suddenly he felt rather sick.
“That damned cheese soufflé last night,” he thought. “I need a drink.”
He was very temperate by habit; he never drank in the morning; he could not remember ever wanting a drink as he did now. He opened a perfectly unimportant letter, frowned at it, and rose, with a purposeful