Had his will left him entirely? Was he to do nothing about it? Why under the sun didn’t he take matters in his own hands and settle the thing himself? There was good reason why he didn’t, and it was not a comforting thought, no pleasant thing to face alone with himself here in the night. What Ethel had brought out in this very bedroom only twenty-­four hours ago was all too true. Had there been a shade of feminine casuistry in her diatribe, had it been in the least specious or unfounded, he would have risen at once to his own defense, refused to take it, and slammed home a point or two of his own. In short, he would have got mad. That she was the one who was mad, and that he was in the position of hanging around till she had made up her mind what to “do about it,” emphasized only too clearly where the guilt lay, the guilt of neglect.

He did not believe she would go so far as to ask for a divorce or even a separation. Far worse, they would probably let it ride eventually and go on with a loveless marriage for the children’s sake, for habit’s sake, or out of sheer inertia or inability to find a substitute. But it was not a loveless marriage—it never had been: never would be, no matter how many brutal sessions they put themselves through in the future. He loved Ethel Cameron: and if he was not in love with her as he once had been, he needed her still, wanted no one else, and would make love to her again when he found his confidence restored as a husband. Many men would not wait for that; if he were half the man he had been, he would move over to her bed this minute. But that was not true; half the man he had been or indeed any man at all would never have made a move in her direction, after the shattering accusations of last night. No man could make love to a suspicious woman; to have done so would have been to make him feel lonelier and more base than any charge in this unhappy world which she might yet bring down upon his head.