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The man looked down at her as if stunned. Arguments of that sort were a bit above the reasoning of the simple masculine animal, who seemed to belong to that race which comprehends little of the complex emotions, and looks on love as the one inevitable passion of life, and on marriage as its logical result and everlasting conclusion.

It was probable at this moment that he completed his alphabet in the great lesson of life–and spelled out painfully the awful truth, that not all the royal service of worship and love in a man’s heart can hold a woman.

There was something akin to a sob in his throat as he replied: “You were so young–so pretty! I could not bear to think that you should soil your hands for me! I wanted to make up to you for all the hardships and sorrows of your childhood. I dreamed of being mother and father as well as husband to you. I thought it would make you happy to owe everything to me–as happy as it made me to give. I would willingly have carried you every step of your life, rather than you should have tired your feet. Is that a sin in a woman’s eyes?”

A whimsical smile broke over the woman’s face. It quivered on her red lips for just a breath, as if conscious how ill-timed it was. “I really like to tire my feet,” she murmured, and she pointed the toe of her tiny boot, as if poised to dance, and looked down on it with evident admiration.

The man caught his breath sharply.

“It’s that damned dancing that has upset you, Dora!”

“Sh! Don’t swear! I do like dancing! I have always told you so. It was you who first admired it. It was you who let me learn.”

“You were my wife! I thought that meant everything to you that it meant to me. I loved your beauty because it was yours; your pleasures because they gave you pleasure. All my ideas of right and wrong in marriage which I learned in my father’s honest house bent to your desires and happiness.”

She looked nervously at the clock. Ten minutes to six.

“Dora–for God’s sake look at me! Dora–you’re not leaving me?”

It was an almost inarticulate cry, as of a man who had foreseen his doom, and only protested from some unconquerable instinct to struggle!

She patted his clenched hand gently.

It was plainly evident that she hated the sight of suffering, and hated more not having her own way, and was possessed by a refined kind of cowardice.

“Don’t make a row, there’s a dear boy! It is like this: I am going over to New York, just for a few weeks. I would have told you yesterday, only I hated spoiling a nice day. It was a nice day?–with a scene. You’ll find a nice long letter at home–it’s a sweet one, too–telling you all about it. Don’t take it too hard! I am going to earn fifty dollars a week–just fancy that–and don’t blame me too much!”

He didn’t seem to hear! He hung his head–the veins in his forehead swelled–there were actually tears in his eyes–and the mighty effort he made to restrain a sob was terrible–and six feet of American manhood, as fine a specimen of the animal as the soil can show, animated by a spirit which represented well the dignity of toil and self-respect, stood bowed down with ungovernable grief and shame before a merely ornamental bit of femininity.

Fate had simply perpetrated another of her ghastly pleasantries!

The woman was perplexed–naturally! But it was evidently the sight of her work, and not the work, itself, that pained her.

“Don’t cut up so rough, Zeke, please don’t,” she went on. “I’m very fond of you–you know that–but I detest the odor of the shop, and it is so easy for us both to escape it.”

He shrank as if she had struck him.