"He wouldn't," replied her husband. "Last time I saw him he looked me over and said: 'Champagne. If you don't stop it you won't live. Don't come here again unless you cut out that poison.' But I never could resist champagne. So I told myself he was an old crank, and found a great doctor I could hire to agree with me. No use to send for Schulze to come all this distance. I might even have to go to his office if I was at Saint X. He won't go to see anybody who's able to move about. 'As they want _me_, let 'em come _to_ me, just as I'd go to them if I wanted them,' he says. 'The air they get on the way is part of the cure.' Besides, he and I had a quarrel. He was talking his nonsense against religion, and I said something, and he implied I wasn't as straight in business as I should be--quoted something about 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,' and one thing led to another, and finally he said, with that ugly jeer of his: 'You pious bandits are lucky to have a forgiving God to go to. Now we poor devils have only our self-respect, and _it_ never forgives anything.'" Whitney laughed, reflected, laughed again. "Yes, I must see Schulze. Maybe--Anyhow, I'm going to Saint X--going home, or as near home as anything my money has left me." He drowsed off. She sat watching him--the great beak, the bulging forehead, the thin, cruel lips; and everywhere in the garden of artificial flowers which formed the surface of her nature, hiding its reality even from herself, there appeared the poisonous snakes of hateful thoughts to shoot their fangs and hiss at him. She shrank and shuddered; yet--"It's altogether his own fault that I feel this way toward him as he lies dying," she said to herself, resorting to human nature's unfailing, universally sought comforter in all trying circumstances--self-excuse. "He always was cold and hard. He has become a monster. And even in his best days he wasn't worthy to have such a woman as I am. And now he is thinking of cheating me--and will do it--unless God prevents him."