He said he had then roared at her: “God, Eva!” And she had advanced, tentatively, as if not sure whether she wished it: “We could have Christmas together; and we might write to each other.” As he told me this, his voice followed his wrath to a higher pitch. “I said to her: ‘It’s Mapes, I daresay.’ I had just heard, incidentally, that he was out there. And she laughed--laughed heartily, as if I were trying to be amusing. It got me. I’ll admit that at once I knew how I had always feared Mapes. I think I struck my fist on her writing-table, and shouted ‘Christ!’ My voice was so loud that it made me jump. When I cleared my throat--because suddenly it had closed up--the rasp of it seemed, in my ears, to beat against the mountain of her meaning, and fall, and come back at me to hurt my head. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I said to her. I spoke in a new queer soft voice: maybe she didn’t hear. And then--I remember, now--I kept on saying: ‘Now then, let’s get this straight. I’m rather at sea. Let’s be sensible.’” He stared at me with almost ludicrous surprise. “For was it sensible, for her to keep on with ‘Do be nice about it, Nick?’” “I’m trying to make out why you couldn’t understand,” I said. “What did she want?” he shouted. “What under heaven did she want?” To this he eventually added: “She didn’t want me. I couldn’t fool myself that she wanted me; in fact, she said plainly that what she wanted with me was a safe harbour, to which she could set sail when in distress. That’s not the right thing for a woman to say to her husband. It came down to this, that she meant to stay away from me except when she should need me to pull her out of trouble. She didn’t need me around every day.” I said: “She didn’t need a man around every day.” He dwelt on this in bewilderment. “She made it plain that she didn’t need me around at all! How did I fail to make myself indispensable to her?” And, in contradiction to his previous assertion, the quaver of his voice proved that he still loved her. I was kind when I replied to this; but I had decided that we had for a long enough time beaten around the bush. “The truth about Eva was that she couldn’t, constitutionally, combine work and marriage. And she cared more for work.” We were at cross purposes: he almost screamed: “But Spencer Mapes!” “So this,” I said slowly, “is what you’ve been believing all this time?” At this he halted, in his restless prowling of the room, and stood in front of me. In his blazing eyes I read all that he had believed during the brief interlude of his marriage. “What, then, did she write you?” “Just what I’ve said: that at last she saw clearly--that at last she had made up her mind to walk alone.” I added, letting him have it: “That lets both you and Spencer Mapes out.” He dropped into a chair. He looked beaten. He stared straight before him, and his hands hung flatly, bonelessly, over the arms of the chair. I noticed that he was older than I had thought.