If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis, she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour--some criticism which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of romance. "I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me." He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot." "What do you owe her that you can't pay?" "Well, I couldn't marry as long as you----" "You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marry _her_?" "I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again; "you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter. "You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a great space out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world, but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things. "We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want anybody but you; just stay with me!" "You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higgleston _forever_?" The unfairness of this overcame me. "Well, why not, if you're married to me?"