"I'm thirty-four and you're a little less than that." He paused and it was more quietly, though none the less tensely that he asked: "Is it your idea that we go through life like this?" She was gathering together the sheets of paper on her desk. She did not speak. "You were angry at me--disappointed. I grant you, as I did at the time, that it was a silly affair, not--not creditable. I tried to show you how little it meant, how it had--just happened. Two years have passed; we are still young people. I want to know--do you intend this to go on? Are our whole lives to be spoiled by a mere silly episode?" She spoke then. "Mere silly episode," she said with a high little laugh, "seems rather a slight way to dispose of the fact that you were untrue to me." She folded her letter and was putting it in the envelope. It would not go in and she refolded it with hands not steady. He did not speak until she had sealed the letter and was sitting there looking down at her hands, rubbing them a little, as if her interest was in them. "Marion," he asked, and his voice shook now, "doesn't it ever seem to you that life is too valuable to throw away like this?" She made no reply and angered by her unresponsiveness he added sharply: "It's rather dangerous, you know." She looked up at him then. "Is this a threat?" she asked with a faint, mocking smile. He moved angrily, starting to leave the room. "Have you no feeling?" he broke out at her. "Is this all you _want_ from life?" She colored and retorted: "It was not the way I expected to live when I married you." He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness. "I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh no, you don't believe in divorce--but you believe in _this_!" "Was it _I_ who brought it about?" she cried, stung to anger. She had risen and for an instant they stood there facing each other. "Haven't you any humanity?" he shot rudely at her. "Don't you ever _feel_?" She colored but drew back, in command of herself again. "I do not desecrate my feelings," she said with composure; "I don't degrade my humanity." "Feeling--humanity!" he sneered, and wheeled about and left the room. He started at once for his rehearsal. He was trembling with anger and yet underneath that passion was an unacknowledged feeling of relief. It had seemed that he had to do something; now he told himself that he had done what he could. He walked slowly through the soft night, seeking control. He was very bitter toward Marion, and yet in his heart he knew that he had asked for what he no longer wanted. He quickened his step toward the Lawrences', where they were to hold the rehearsal, where he would find Ruth Holland. CHAPTER EIGHT