"Imagine it! I had forgotten that dinner!" Dick answered bitterly. For a
moment he turned away as though, he would not see her while he
readjusted something in himself. He felt like a different man and looked
to her indefinably strange when he faced her again quietly. To himself
he was saying, "What would Ellery do?" and on his answer to his own
question he was readjusting his whole life.
"We will not go out this evening, Lena," he said. "We've come to a
crisis in our affairs more important than a club dinner."
"What, have you been losing money?" cried Lena, startled and resentful.
Dick looked at her with a very unpleasant smile.
"No," he answered. "I wonder what you would say if I told you that I was
ruined?"
Lena gasped with horror. For the moment she could not speak. A gulf of
poverty--no one knew better than she what that meant--yawned before her.
A blind fury against Dick, if he should have plunged her into this,
possessed her; and Dick watched her and read her as he had never done
before.
"Will you sit down?" he asked courteously. "I want to talk with
you--just by our two selves. I haven't lost any money, Lena. Let me
relieve your mind of its worst apprehension." Her face smoothed, but
she seated herself quietly, puzzled and foreboding. Dick was so
singularly inaccessible.
"I've lost no money," he repeated, "but I've come desperately near ruin
for all that. Lena, a moment ago I made a real appeal to your love. You
answered me by a shrug and a push for fear that I might muss that very
pretty and exceedingly becoming gown. It was a kind of illustration of
all our married life."
Lena still stared at him dumbly, vague with uncomprehending fear. This
didn't seem like the easy-going husband she knew. She wished he would
look at her.
"When we were married," he went on, "I had a dream that a man's wife
stood for his ideals, that he might mold his life by her purity and
nobleness and love. I've always been saying, in effect, 'Lead on, Mrs.
Percival and I will follow where you lead!' You've led me into the
depths, Lena, and I'm never going to say that to you any more. You and I
have got to remold our relations and start again."
"What has happened?" Lena asked faintly, and feeling very helpless. She
seemed suddenly to realize how very big Dick's body was, and how little
chance she stood against it. If he was inaccessible in spirit she had no
hold over him. She wished he would get angry. That would be something
concrete. She would know how to meet it.
"What has happened?" she repeated.
"Only this," Dick said. "I am going to refuse to delude myself any
longer; and it is fair to you as it is to me that you should know it. I
am going to stop telling myself that you are my ideal woman, when you
have shown me, for instance, your unwillingness to make such tender
self-sacrifice as a mother must give to a child--that you are true and
honest when you are guilty of an underhand thrust like that little squib
about Madeline--that--"