"Very well," responded Claire, as she watched his receding figure, "_I_ am going." His back was turned to her, but he suddenly veered round, facing her, and saying, with a bitter sharpness: "Go, if you please! Go, and leave me to my misery! If you cared for me in the right manner, you would not want to go. You would want to stay with me, and forget, for a while at least, the gay crowds that admire and court you!" These words were utterly unexpected. He had never before alluded to her lack of fondness. She was embarrassed, ashamed. For a moment she could not speak. Then she simulated an affronted demeanor; it seemed her sole refuge. "I--I care for you as much as I have always cared," she said. "No more and no less." She moved toward the door at once, after thus speaking. She wondered if he would seek to detain her. He did not.... She entered her coupé very soon afterward. During the drive to Mrs. Vanvelsor's reception she had a keen remembrance of just how Hollister had looked when her final gaze had dwelt upon him. She knew that she had stung at last into life the perception of how much he had been giving and how little he had received. Her conscience sternly smote her; she was more than once on the verge of ordering that the vehicle should be driven home again. But in her then mood any attempt at amendment seemed wildly futile. What could she say to her husband? That she deplored his possible ruin? Yes; but not that such regret sprang from the sweet sources of a wifely, unselfish love. She could not regard the possibility of being flung downward from her present high place with any unselfish feeling. Mrs. Diggs had touched the living and sensitive truth last night: her thirst for luxury had grown a vice. Soft raiment, obsequious attendance, a place of supreme social distinction, all these had become vitally, imperiously needful to her happiness. It was not the sort of happiness which she believed high or fine. She could most clearly conceive of another, less fervid, less material, less intoxicating, fraught with a spiritual incentive and an intellectual meaning. But it was too late to dream of that now. She had taken the bent; she must have power or nothing. She regarded the idea of being obscure and with straitened funds as a calamity simply horrible. Hollister must think her cruel as death; that was inevitable. She did not blame him for blaming her. She blamed herself for having married him with loveless apathy. His reproachful words haunted her--but what could she do? He wanted genuine tenderness, sympathy, fortifying cheer. But he wanted these from an impulse of which her heart had always been incapable. Fate was avenging itself upon her. She had tampered with holy things. Her marriage oath had been a mockery. Could she go back and tell him this? Could she go back and lie to him, feign before him? No; best that she should not go back at all.