Why, indeed, had he fired Betty Sheridan? He hadn't really given himself an account of the inward reasons yet. The episode had been too disturbing; and it was George's characteristic to put off looking on unpleasant facts as long as possible. Had he been really hard up, which he never had been, he would undoubtedly have put away, unopened, the bills he couldn't pay. Life was already presenting him with the bill of yesterday's ill humor, and he was not yet ready to add up the amount. He hid himself now behind the austerity of the offended husband. "My dear," he inquired in his turn, "don't you think that you had best leave the details of my office to me?" He knew how lame this was, and how inadequate, before Genevieve replied. "Betty Sheridan is not a detail of your office. She's one of my best friends, and I want to know why you fired her. I dare say she was exasperating; but I can't see any reason why you should have done it. You should have let her leave." It was Betty, with that lamentable lack of delicacy which George had pointed out to her, who had not been ready to leave. "You will have to let me be the judge of what I should or should not have done," said George. This piece of advice Genevieve ignored. "Why did you send her away?" she demanded. "I sent her away, if you want to know, for her insolence and her damned bad taste. If you think--working in my office as she was--it's decent or proper on her part to be active in a campaign that is against me----" "You mean because she's a suffragist? You sent her away for _that_! Why, really, that's _tyranny_! It's like my sending away some one working for me for her beliefs----" They stood staring at each other, not questioningly as they had yesterday, but as enemies,--the greater enemies that they so loved each other. Because of that each word of unkindness was a doubled-edged sword. They quarreled. It was the first time that they had seen each other without illusion. They had been to each other the ideal, the lover, husband, wife. Now, in the dismay of his amazement in finding himself quarreling with the perfect wife, a vagrant memory came to George that he had heard that Genevieve had a hot temper. She certainly had. He didn't notice how handsome she looked kindled with anger. He only knew that the rose garden in which they lived was being destroyed by their angry hands; that the very foundation of the life they had been leading was being undermined. The time of mirage and glamour was over. He had ceased being a hero and an ideal, and why? Because, forgetting his past life, his record, his achievement, Genevieve obstinately insisted on identifying him with one single mistake. He was willing to concede it was a mistake. She had not only identified him with it, but she had called him a number of wounding things.