Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/93

 quarter. They'd have to fight it out between themselves, as she and Higgins had to do, arter they'd started and meant to go on in the same way.

Then the drifting hopelessly apart, as it seems to the husband, of a couple that had ever been hopelessly apart. The sickening suspicion (how long and cruelly it takes to become a settled, serviceable, useful, fruit-bearing certainty) that his wife doesn't love him any longer, the wife who never loved him at all ; that she doesn't want him, she who never did, and only married him on impulse, or for vanity, or caprice, or to be her own mistress in a home of her own, or because of rows at home, or because somebody else wanted him or her, or didn't want her, or through disappointment, chagrin, or spite. What fools men are! Or because, only, of his looks, money, position, name, or fame. The soul-sickening suspicion and fright of the good, kind, generous, or " soft " husband, that his wife wants to get rid of him—the wife who had an eye to that contingency from the first, and had started wanting to get rid of him early. The blindness, the pitiful, unmanly pleading of the husband whose wife is not, and never was, fit to blacken his boots, who never had a sincerely kind thought or considerate moment for him. When the only cure is separation to a distance, a year or two to recover, and a stern and life-long adherence to the creed or philosophy of unforgiveness.

Then the paltry, useless, wasting quarrels. "I didn't want to marry you". . . "Better men than you," and so on, and wearyingly so on, to the