He had some kind of explanation with her on the day after the party, and made some feeble kind of apology. But she was cold and dumb; she expressed no anger, neither complained nor reproached him; she shed no tears. She stood before him in her white silence, still beautiful, but with a pale, unearthly beauty that chilled his heart. All the force of the old love swept back upon him; and his heart ached with a passion of pity and regret. He seized her by the shoulders--so frail, so wasted, since last year--and looked at her with despairing eyes. "Vera, you are killing yourself by inches. What can I do? What can I do for you? Shall we go away? Ever so far away? to new worlds--to places where the stupendous phenomena of Nature, and the things that men have made, will take us out of ourselves? There are things in this world so tremendous that they can kill thought. The Zambesi, the Aztec cities of Mexico, the great Wall of China." "You are very good," she answered, coldly but not unkindly--rather with a weary indifference, as of a soul too tired to feel or think. "I am quite contented here. My life in this house suits me as well as any life could." "In this house?" he cried. "Yes, in this house. I am not alone here. But I don't want to keep you here if the house makes you unhappy. You had better go away, Claude; go anywhere you like, as you like. I shall not complain." "Are you giving me a letter of license?" he asked, with a harsh laugh. "Is your love quite dead?" "Everything is dead," she answered. He could get no more from her, and he left her in anger. "You had better divorce me and marry Francis Symeon," he said, "and cultivate spookism together." The natural sequel to a scene like that was a little dinner at Claridge's with Mrs. Bellenden, and an evening at the silliest musical comedy to be seen and heard in London. His wife had given him a letter of license. She had ceased to love him. He made himself so disagreeable to Mrs. Bellenden by dinner-time that the meal was eaten in sullen silence; and the Magnum of Veuve Pommeroy was hardly enough for two, for when Mrs. Bellenden was in a rage her glass had to be filled very often, and the waiters at the smart hotels knew her ways. The waiters worshipped her. "She tips as handsome as she tipples," had been said of her by one of them. CHAPTER XXIX Everything was dead. That had been Vera's answer when Claude asked despairingly if love was dead. The words were in her mind now as she stood alone in the room where her poets, and her actors, and her philosophers, looked at her from the white walls, and where the sound of the great hall door closing heavily as her husband shut it behind him was still in her ears.