"Oh, very well! If you are so fickle as all that, _I_ don't know what to say to you." She put the letter down on the table before him, and went out of the room. He tried to write, but with the hurt of what he felt her unkindness he could not, and after a certain time he feigned an errand into their room, where she had shut herself from him, and found her lying down. "Are you sick?" he asked, coldly. "Not at all," she answered. "I suppose one may lie down without being sick, as you call it. I should say ill, myself." "I'm so glad you're not sick that I don't care what you call it." He was going out, when she spoke again: "I didn't know you cared particularly, you are always so much taken up with your work. I suppose, if you wrote those letters for the _Abstract_, you need never think of me at all, whether I was ill or well." "You would take care to remind me of your existence from time to time, I dare say. You haven't the habit of suffering in silence a great deal." "You would like it better, of course, if I had." "A great deal better, my dear. But I didn't know that you regarded my work as self-indulgence altogether. I have flattered myself now and then that I was doing it for you, too." "Oh yes, very likely. But if you had never seen me you would be doing it all the same." "I'm afraid so. I seem to have been made that way. I'm sorry you don't approve. I supposed you did once." "Oh, I do approve--highly." He left her, and she heard him getting his hat and stick in the little hallway, as if he were going out of doors. She called to him, "What I wonder is how a man so self-centred that he can't look at his wife for days together, can tell whether another woman's eyes are smouldering or not." Maxwell paused, with his hand on the knob, as if he were going to make some retort, but, perhaps because he could think of none, he went out without speaking. He stayed away all the forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked by vast flotillas of canal-boats. As he passed one of these he heard the sound of furious bickering within, and while he halted a man burst from the gangway and sprang ashore, followed by the threats and curses of a woman, who put her head out of the hatch to launch them after him.