But actually I was not feeling over-cheerful, because Jasper's second object in coming to America was to leave his wife in Sioux City, so that she could secure a divorce from him, on quite un-Scriptural grounds. Hardress told me of this at least without any excitement. He did not blame her. He was too old for her, too stolid, too dissimilar in every respect, he said. Their marriage had been a mistake, that was all,--a mismating, as many marriages were. She wanted to marry someone else, he rather thought. And "Oh, Lord! yes!" I inwardly groaned. "She probably does." Aloud I said: "But the Bible--Yes, I _am_ provincial at bottom. It's because I always think in nigger-English and translate it when I talk. It was my Mammy, you see, who taught me how to think,--and in our nigger-English, what the Bible says is true. Why, Jasper, even this Revised Version of yours says flatly that a man--" "Child, child!" said Jasper Hardress, and he patted my hair, and I really think it crinkled under his touch, "when you grow up--if indeed you ever do,--you will find that a man's feeling for his wife and the mother of his children, is not altogether limited by what he has read in a book. He wants--well, just her happiness." I looked up without thinking; and the aspect of that gross and unattractive man humiliated me. He had reached a height denied to such as I; and inwardly I cursed and envied this fat Jasper Hardress.... I would have told him everything, had not the waiter come just then. 3 And the same afternoon I was alone with Gillian Hardress, for the first time in somewhat more than two years. We had never written each other; I had been too cautious for that; and now when the lean, handsome woman came toward me, murmuring "Jack--" very tenderly,--for she had always called me Jack, you may remember,--I raised a hand in protest. "No,--that is done with, Jill. That is dead and buried now, my dear." She remained motionless; only her eyes, which were like chrysoberyls, seemed to grow larger and yet more large. There was no anger in them, only an augmenting wonder. "Ah, yes," she said at last, and seemed again to breathe; "so that is dead and buried--in two years." Gillian Hardress spoke with laborious precision, like a person struggling with a foreign language, and articulating each word to its least sound before laying tongue to its successor. "Yes! we have done with each other, once for all," said I, half angrily. "I wash my hands of the affair, I clean the slate today. I am not polite about it, and--I am sorry, dear. But I talked with your husband this morning, and I will deceive Jasper Hardress no longer. The man loves you as I never dreamed of loving any woman, as I am incapable of loving any woman. He dwarfs us. Oh, go and tell him, so that he may kill us both! I wish to God he would!"