She knew every modulation; he had pleaded with her so often before! His trying it now only hardened her mind and cleared her faculties; and with that flash of vision came the sense that she was actually seeing him for the first time. There he stood, stripped of her dreams, while she registered in a clear objective way all the strength and weakness, the flaws and graces of his person, marked the premature thinning of his smooth brown hair, the incipient crows’-feet about the lids, their too tender droop over eyes not tender enough, and that slight slackness of the mouth that had once seemed a half-persuasive pout, and was now only a sign of secret uncertainties and indulgences. She saw it all, and under the rich glaze of a greater prosperity, a harder maturity, a prompter self-assurance and resourcefulness, she reached to the central failure. That was what she became aware of--and aware too that the awful fact of actually seeing another human being might happen to one for the first time only after years of intimacy. She averted her eyes as from a sight not meant for her. “It’s bad enough,” she heard him repeat. She turned back to him and her answer caught up his unfinished phrase. “Ah--you do realize how bad it is? That’s the reason why you’ve given up your job? Because you see that you must go? Are you going now--going at once?” “Going--going?” He echoed the word in his flat sleep-walking voice. “How on earth can I go?” The question completely hardened whatever his appearance, the startled beaten look of him, had begun to soften in her. She stood gazing at him and laughed. “How can you go? Are you mad? Why, what else on earth can you do?” As he stood before her she began to be aware that he had somehow achieved the attitude of dignity for which she was still struggling. He looked like an unhappy man, a cowed man; but not a guilty one. “If you’d waited I should myself have asked you to let me explain--” he began. “Explain? What is there to explain?” “For one thing, why I can’t go away--go for good, as you suggest.” “Suggest? I don’t suggest! I order it.” “Well--I must disobey your order.” They stood facing each other while she tried to gather up the shattered fragments of her authority. She had said to herself that what lay before her was horrible beyond human imagining; but never once had she imagined that, if she had the strength to speak, he would have the strength to defy her. She opened her lips, but no sound came. “You seem ready to think the worst of me; I suppose that’s natural,” he continued. “The best’s bad enough. But at any rate, before ordering me to go, perhaps you ought to know that I _did_ go--once.” She echoed the word blankly. “Once?”