He considered. "Yes--that's pioneering and motor-building, I suppose. It's the old New York blood that's so clogged with taboos. Poor father always wants me to behave like a Knight of the Round Table." Nona lifted her eyebrows with an effort of memory. "How did they behave?" "They were always hitting some other fellow over the head." She felt a little catch in her throat. "Who--particularly--does he want you to hit over the head?" "Oh, we haven't got as far as that yet. It's just the general principle. Anybody who looks too hard at Lita." "You _would_ have to be hitting about! Everybody looks hard at Lita. How in the world can she help it?" "That's what I tell him. But he says I haven't got the feelings of a gentleman. Guts, he means, I suppose." He leaned back, crossing his arms wearily behind his back, his sallow face with heavy-lidded eyes tilted to the ceiling. "Do you suppose Lita feels that too?" he suddenly flung at his sister. "That you ought to break people's heads for her? She'd be the first to laugh at you!" "So I told him. But he says women despise a man who isn't jealous." Nona sat silent, instinctively turning her eyes from his troubled face. "Why should you be jealous?" she asked at length. He shifted his position, stretched his arms along his knees, and brought his eyes down to a level with hers. There was something pathetic, she thought, in such youthful blueness blurred with uncomprehended pain. "I suppose it's never got much to do with reasons," he said, very low. "No; that's why it's so silly--and ungenerous." "It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't care a hang if I'm jealous or if I'm not. She doesn't care anything about me. I've simply ceased to exist for her." "Well, then you can't be in her way." "It seems I am, though. Because I do exist, for the world; and as the boy's father. And the mere idea gets on her nerves." Nona laughed a little bitterly. "She wants a good deal of elbow-room, doesn't she? And how does she propose to eliminate you?" "Oh, that's easy. Divorce." There was a silence between the two. This was how it sounded--that simple reasonable request--on the lips of the other partner, the partner who still had a stake in the affair! Lately she seemed to have forgotten that side of the question; but how hideously it grimaced at her now, behind the lines of this boyish face wrung with a man's misery! "Old Jim--it hurts such a lot?" He jerked away from her outstretched hand. "Hurt? A fellow can stand being hurt. It can't hurt more than feeling her chained to me. But if she goes--what does she go to?" Ah--that was it! Through the scorch and cloud of his own suffering he had seen it, it was the centre of his pain. Nona glanced down absently at her slim young hands--so helpless and inexperienced looking. All these tangled cross-threads of life, inextricably and fatally interwoven; how were a girl's hands to unravel them? "I suppose she's talked to you--told you her ideas?" he asked.