Margaret knew all about it now. From her point of view certain conventions of non-interference between husband and wife were so many links in the old chain. Undoubtedly it was not that she wanted to force Helen’s confidence. But to come upon Helen the Monday after that exhausting Sunday, come to her to say good-by and make plans for the future, and to find the splendid dignity and poise of the Helen she had been with in Chicago destroyed angered her. Helen had told her the facts. She had to tell some one, she told herself in a justification she felt bound to make in secret, and Margaret was at least a stranger in the city and moreover the only woman she knew who would not make the slightest impulse to carry her story to other ears. Margaret, in immaculate white linen, looking as cool and competent as an operating surgeon, had listened. She heard the whole of the story, how Gage had changed--for that Helen insisted upon. “He’s simply not himself. I suppose it’s the feeling he has towards the girl.” “Don’t ‘the girl’ her, Helen. I’m not a bit sure of that part of the story. Somehow it’s too preposterous that Freda should be languishing somewhere waiting for Gage’s casual attention. I tell you that girl doesn’t languish. She’s not that kind. She’s the most magnificently unconscious modern you ever saw. She wouldn’t be any one’s mistress. She hasn’t that much dependence in her. Not for a minute. I simply don’t believe it.” “She disappeared the day after he came back from the convention. And then he was away that week-end she was seen at the Roadside Inn.” “I don’t believe she was ever seen there,” said Margaret. Helen put her hand to her head. “I don’t want to believe it, but if he won’t deny it--and isn’t it possible that the poor child’s run away even from him? If she should be going to have--oh, damn, I can’t say it even--” She broke off a little hysterically. “No--I don’t believe that either.” But for all her stout words, Margaret sounded a little more dubious this time. “Let’s leave her out of it. What is there to do about you and Gage?” “I despise my own incompetence of decision,” said Helen. “But I don’t know. I don’t know how to go through the business. It seems impossible that we’ve come to the edge of divorce but I can’t go on living with a man who acts as Gage does. I can’t, that is, with any measure of self-respect. And yet I look around and the very weight of detail--the tremendous business of unwinding a marriage--it seems then as if the quick flare-up of partings that you read about--the separations that never involve themselves with the machinery of complaints and retaining lawyers and distributing property and--moving vans--are quite fantastic. I wonder if it’s laziness which keeps me so fearful of the mass of detail, Margaret--” “Of course you’re trivial on purpose, I suppose,” answered Margaret. “The things you speak of don’t really bother you.”