"Go to see him? Why, that’s what I came back for! I’d like to do it this very afternoon, if you’d tell me first how it all came about. You see, I don’t know anything, except the two or three bald facts dad mentioned in his cablegram." It was not easy to tell this story, even to a man whom she knew to be so kind. The fact that he was her husband didn’t help her, for the reason that it was because he was her husband that her pride was in revolt. Had he not been her husband, he would have been free to withdraw from this series of catastrophes. Now he could not withdraw. He was tied. Moreover, the sordid tale of domestic want became the more sordid when given fact by fact. It was the intimate story of her life in contrast to the intimate story of his. The homely family dodges for making both ends meet which had been the mere jest of penury between Gussie, Gladys, and herself became ghastly when exposed to a man who had never known the lack of service and luxury, to say nothing of food and drink, since the minute he was born. She felt as if it emptied her of any little dignity she had ever possessed, as if it denuded her of self-respect. She could more easily have confessed sins to him than the shifts to which they had been put to live. Nevertheless, she went through with it, brokenly, with great effort, and yet with a kind of dogged will to drain all the dregs of the cup. "He’ll see me as I am," was part of her underlying thought. "He’ll know then that I can’t go on with this comedy of having married him. Even if I have, we’ve got to end it somehow." But on his side the reaction was different. He had never heard this sort of tale before. He had never before been in contact with this phase of poverty. He had known poor men in college, and plenty of chaps who were down on their luck; but the daily pinching and paring of whole families just to have enough to eat and to wear was so new as to astonish him. For the minute it made Jennie less an individual than a type. "My God!" he was saying inwardly, "do human beings have to live so close to the edge as all that?" When she had told him of the incident of the cutting off of the gas because they couldn’t pay fifteen dollars on account, the turning point of Teddy’s tragedy, his exclamation was embarrassing to them both: "Why, I pay twice that for a pair of shoes!" Though she knew he meant it as a protest against the straits to which they had been put, it seemed both to him and to her to make the gulf between them wider. "And you were going through all that," he said, when she had finished her recital, "during the months when I was seeing you two and three times a week at the studio. My God! how I wish you could have told me!" It was the first time that a little smile came quivering to her lips. "You don’t tell things like that—not to anyone outside your family. Besides, it isn’t worth while. You get used to them." "You weren’t used to it—when your mother cried—and Teddy forked out the money."