“True as death,” he said; “but what does it all matter? Your relentlessness is the friend’s natural feeling. It shows how bootless it is to give account. I care more for your opinion than any other, but even your scorn does not signify to me here. It misses the point. The only pride that is involved is pride in my own immutability. Love ought always to be a regeneration,” he went on, as if putting into shape the thoughts that were rising out of the recent chaos in his mind. “It’s easy enough to keep true when the love, the joy, the equal give and take, go on unbroken. It’s when a man actually turns and walks out of heaven, and the gates shut behind him forever, that he finds out the stuff that’s in him. Sometimes, when I think about it, I try to fancy what would be my humiliation if I found I had grown to love her less.” Martha was silent a moment. Then she said, as if urged by the necessity of speaking out, for this once, all that she had so long kept back: “Suppose, after you get the divorce, you should hear that she was married?” “I’m braced to bear that, if it comes,” he said. “I know it is possible, but I don’t fear it. I may, of course, be wrong; but I don’t believe, with what has been between us, that she could ever be the wife of another man while I lived. She might think so. She might even try--go part of the way; but I never felt more secure of anything than that she would find herself unable to do it.” “Then do you think that she possibly still cares for you?” “No; I’m not a fool. She made that point sufficiently plain. Didn’t she tell me, in the downright, simple words, that she did not love me--had never loved me--had found out it was all a mistake? I believe she meant it absolutely. I believe it was true. You don’t suppose, if I doubted it, I’d have given her up as I have done?” “Oh, Harold, what was it all about, that quarrel that you had? Could you bear to tell me?” “There’s nothing to tell. We thought we were perfectly suited, perfectly sympathetic. Our feelings had stood every test but marriage. When it came to that, they failed. It was a case of non-adjustment of feelings--different points of view--different natures, perhaps. I saw facing me the demand that I should change myself, root and branch, and become a different creature from what God had made me. This I could not do. I might have pretended and acted, but she was not the woman to tolerate the wretched puppet of a man which that would have made of me. _Her_ changing was a thing I never thought of. I was never mean enough to think that a woman was bound to sacrifice her individuality in marriage. Why should a wife surrender that sacred citadel any more than a husband? How odious should I feel myself, if I had ever taken that position in the slightest degree! And shams were out of the question with us. Neither of us could have tolerated anything uncandid--anything that smacked of a tacit convention.”