Each evening, as he returned home from the office, Jimmie determined to have the matter out with his wife, he perceived that he was being made ridiculous, which is of all things most intolerable to a man. And each evening, seeing Nell’s white face and averted eyes, his courage failed him, and the words would not come.
He spent two afternoons sitting on a bench on Riverside Drive, both fearing and hoping to see Nell with Mason, and feeling a curious sense of disappointment when his quest failed. He wanted very much to see Mason, and he feared him — horribly.
Then, one evening, he found a note on the mantel in the dining room, addressed to Nell, who had evidently been at no pains to conceal it. It was from Mason, and contained the information that he would call at her home on the following afternoon.
Jimmie read it over twice, and found himself studying the handwriting with a sort of detached curiosity, when Nell entered from the kitchen. She stopped short, glancing at the note, then at Jimmie’s face; and for some moments they stood looking at each other in silence.
When, a few minutes later, they seated themselves at the table, Jimmie, controlling his voice with difficulty, said simply:
“Have you answered it?”
“Yes,” said Nell. The meal proceeded in silence.
It was this that at last roused Jimmie to action. He decided on the weakest possible course — and the wisest.
After six hours of tortured thought and painful indecision, he sat down on the edge of his bed at three o’clock in the morning and wrote a farewell letter to his wife. It was a curious performance.
He declared that he had always loved her and always would, and she would never hear from him again, because she would be happy, and it was her fault, but he forgave her, and he knew that what he was doing wasn’t manly but he couldn’t help it, and he had never seen Mason anyway (he repeated this three times), and he didn’t believe that she had ever loved him, and God bless her.
This he folded and sealed and left on the table in his own room.
At seven o’clock, while Nell was still asleep, he left the house with two full suitcases, which he carried to an express office and there ordered delivered at the home of his married sister.
Then, after an attempt at breakfast in a lunchroom, he wandered about the streets aimlessly until time to go to his office. He didn’t at all realize what he had done, and he felt a curious sense of relief and freedom.
At one o’clock that afternoon, while Jimmie was standing at his thirtieth-story office window, staring with unseeing eyes at the antlike throng in the street below, Nell was sitting on the edge of her husband’s bed, holding in her hand an open letter which she had just read for the third time.
She had found it only a half-hour before, and she was trying to reconcile the moisture in her eyes and the uncomfortable lump in her throat with the fact that there was now nothing — apparently — between her and her desire.
She understood Jimmie’s action perfectly, and she felt that he deserved to be despised for his weakness. But she was conscious only of an intolerable pity. She refolded the note and placed it in the bosom of her dress.
She was, of course, glad that Jimmie had gone. But somehow—
In the meantime Mason was to come at three o’clock. Yesterday this thought had filled her with a keen pleasure. Now she experienced an unaccountable feeling of revulsion, and she hated herself for it.
If there had been nothing irrevocably wrong in her relations with Mason, it was more through good luck than her own wisdom; she had been willing to surrender everything except the hollow shell of outward appearances; and now that the shell was gone, she saw the naked folly, the common ugliness of the thing, and she shrank from it.
She contemplated the Nell of yesterday with an indescribable contempt, and wondered why. Then she threw herself, face downward, on the bed, and remained so, silent, for a long time.
When the doorbell rang she did not move. It rang again and again. During the pause that followed Nell heard her heart beating loudly, as it seemed, in protest.
Then the bell rang once more, long and violently — and then silence.
As Jimmie approached the entrance of his married sister’s apartment that evening he felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to turn and run. He had had a whole day in which to consider his conduct, and he was beginning to be very much ashamed of it.
At the moment, it had appeared to be merely the means of escape from an intolerable situation; its desperateness and finality were only now beginning to be apparent to him. In short, he was in a very fair way to repent at leisure.
His sister met him at the door. She looked startled at the sight of his face. It was white and drawn, and his eyes were red.
“What’s the matter?” asked his sister. “What has happened to you?”
Then her face became stern and her lips set in a straight line.
“No,” said Jimmie. “Not that, sis. But, for God’s sake, tell me what to do.”
It was an interminable and considerably tangled story that he told her, after she had taken him into her own room, but his sister had no difficulty in understanding it. She sat in grim silence while he explained his part of the marital wreck, and confessed his utter inability to understand his wife’s conduct.
When he had finished his sister rose without a word and, going to her wardrobe, began to put on her hat and gloves. Jimmie rose of his feet in alarm and opened his mouth to protest. Before he could speak his sister said:
“You keep still. You’ve said enough.”
“But — where are you going?” stammered Jimmie.
His sister completed her preparations in silence. At the door she turned.
“Jimmie,” she said, “if you are my own brother, you’re a perfect idiot. Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you tell me before? You know very well you never had any sense — I’ve told you so. All this could have been prevented. Now maybe it’s too late. I’m going to see Nell, and I want you to follow me in two hours. I want to see her first alone. Remember — two hours — don’t come sooner.”
“But I say—” began Jimmie.
The door slammed in his face.
Jimmie sat down in a chair and wondered why she had called him an idiot, and how it could “all have been prevented,” and what she could possibly say to Nell. Then his brother-in-law arrived and insisted on Jimmie dining with him. Jimmie protested that he wasn’t hungry, but was finally dragged away.
“Is Nell sick?” asked the brother-in-law as they seated themselves at the table. He had been told that his wife had gone to see her.
Jimmie mumbled a negative.
“Anything wrong?”
“No.”
After which the brother-in-law remained discreetly silent, while Jimmie strove valiantly with a fierce desire to tell him everything, being restrained only by a sense of the weakness and folly of his own conduct.
He pretended to eat, fingered his napkin and knife and fork nervously, and looked at his watch every two minutes. As the brother-in-law pushed back his coffee cup and lit a cigar a maid appeared in the doorway.
“You’re wanted at home at once, sir,” she said to Jimmie. “Mrs. Thrawn just telephoned.”
Jimmie jumped to his feet and, without a word to the astonished brother-in-law, rushed through the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house.
“Say,” shouted the brother-in-law, “wait a minute! You forgot your hat!”
But Jimmie was already out of sight.
As he stepped from the car, which had made an incredible number of stops and had seemed to go forward at less than a snail’s pace, and approached the door of his own flat, Jimmie slackened his gait and finally halted.