“I hate it just as much as you do, John Grandin, I hate every bit of it! It isn’t easy for a woman to admit these things. This isn’t the kind of vacation I’d planned, any more than you did. But it had to happen. All week I’ve been dreading it, because I knew you’d expect to go to bed with me tonight—because you thought I’d expect it—and it was something I couldn’t do. Not this time! Not tonight I couldn’t! . . . Don’t think I don’t want to. I do. But if I weakened and went to bed with you and forgot everything I’ve been telling myself this past week, we’d be right back where we were before—exactly nowhere!”

“Ethel! There are people in the next room!”

“Do you want to know something? Every time I menstruate I always manage to tell you in some way or other. Not that you’d ever know, but I always drop some hint by saying I have a backache or cramps or just plain having the curse. And do you know why I do that. I don’t do it just to relieve your mind of the obligation of coming to bed with me those few nights—”

“Be careful!”

“—No, that isn’t why I do it. I do it for myself! I do it because then I don’t have to lie in bed alone and know that you’re sitting in your study feeling sorry for me, thinking maybe you ought to do something about it, wondering if I’m expecting you, and would I mind it too much if you put it off one more—”

“For God’s sake, Ethel!”

“I— John, I—” She burst into sobs and ran from the room.

For some moments he heard the water running in the bathroom; she would be applying a cold towel to her eyes. He sat on the bed, unable to move, unstrung. After what seemed many minutes, she came back in and went to the bureau.

Watching her blowing her nose at the mirror, his mind went back several years to the time when, dining in a restaurant, she had suddenly got up from the table and walked out, crying audibly as she went and making a holy show of herself, leaving him in the most public humiliation to finish the meal alone. When he got home he had found her in bed with a bar of chocolate reading a mystery story. It had been their most serious quarrel, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was about. . . .

“It’s no good,” she said, wiping her eyes, “I always cry. . . .”

“Then why do you start anything in the first place,” he thundered, seeing it was safely over. “You only get the worst of it!”