“You’re right! Make fun of it, if you like, but it is a moral question. And I’m not coming to bed with you tonight.—That’s what you’ve been banking on for the past month, isn’t it?”

“Well, hardly. Not on your not coming to bed with me, that is.”

She ignored this and went on with a rush. “For the past month you’ve been telling yourself, ‘I’ll make it up to her when we get to Sconset.’ Isn’t that true? Isn’t it? Well, this time it won’t work! What do you think I am, anyway? Someone to go to bed with just when you happen to feel like it, maybe half a dozen times a year? What about me? How do you think I feel night after night? Don’t you suppose I have feelings?”

His stomach went weak because of all that was happening. Bitterly he was reminded of what he had been thinking on the train: how he genuinely meant to alter his habits, how he planned to move back to her room, how he wanted to be a better husband. . . . But to speak of it now—no, it was most certainly not the moment. What he said was:

“Lower your voice, please.”

“Night after night I lie in bed wondering what to do about it—”

Desperately in need of recapturing the initiative, he cut in quickly: “Not for long,” he said sarcastically. “You always fall asleep in five minutes. With the light on.”

But she had not heard. “I’ve finally come to my senses about a few things! You’re not going to put me in that position again, do you hear? Never meaning anything to you, never knowing whether you want me, never— If you knew the humiliation of getting fixed, and—and then later having to unfix myself because nothing happened! The times I’ve gotten ready and—”

“Ethel, good Christ!”

“—And I’ve only gotten ready then because you’d been extra nice at dinner and paid a lot of attention to me and I thought maybe this was going to be the time—”

“Stop! We’ve had enough of this!”