There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips. There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at ten o'clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to unbutton his collar.

She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.

"Albert."

"Yes?"

"Let me go!"

"Huh?"

"It's wrong. I've made a mistake. I don't want to be married."

For a full second he held that pose at his collar button, his entire being seeming to suspend a beat.

"What say?" not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.

She was amazed at her ability to reply.

"I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can't stand being married to you."

He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old door on its hinges.

"Now lookahere," he said, rather roughly for him; "it's all right for a woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I've been as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many a man with his woman."

"I'm not that!" she cried, springing to her feet.

"What?"

"That! Your—that!"

"Call it what you want," he said, "all I know is that you're my wife and I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her."

She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.

"Let me go," she said.

He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching and unclenching them.

"Good God!" he said. "What say?"

"It's no use! I've tried. I'm wrong. Something in me is stronger than you or mamma or papa or—or environment. All my life I've been fighting against just—just—this. And now I've let it trap me."

"Darn funny time to be finding it out."

"That's the terrible part! To think it took this—marriage—to awaken me to a meaning of myself."

"Bah! Your meaning to yourself is no better than any other woman's."

"A month ago it would have been so simple—to have had the courage—then. To have realized then! Why—why can life be like that?"

"Like what?"

"You remember the night coming home from the Highlands? I tried to tell you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That's been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to combat their desires for me. They've always placed me under such ghastly obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation is to me, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires! But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment—suck—me in. If only I had fought harder! It took this trap—marriage! All of a sudden I'm awake! Don't try to keep me, Albert. I haven't known until this minute that my mind is made up. So made up that it frightens me even more than you. I'd rather be on my own in a garret, Albert! It's kinder to tell you. We mustn't get into this thing deeper. Nothing can change me. Don't try."

She put up her hands as if to ward off some sort of blow, but in her heart not afraid, and she wanted to be afraid of him. He did whirl a chair toward her by the back, but sat down, jerking her into one opposite, facing her so that their knees touched, and she could see the spots on his temples that responded so to beefsteak, throbbing. Her terror rose a little to the volume of his silence. His head was so square. She wanted him to rage and she to hurl herself against his storm. Her whole being wanted a lashing. She could pinch herself to the capacity of her strength without wincing.

But on the contrary, his voice, when it came, was muted.

"Lilly," he said, "you're sick. You're affected with the heat." His look of utter daze irritated her.

"Sick! You mean I was sick before! I'm well now."

"You're either sick or crazy!"

"I'm trapped. I was born trapped, but now I tell you I'm free! Something up here in my brain—down here in my heart—has set me free! You can't keep me. No one can. I want out!"

"In God's name, what are you driving at?"

"You wouldn't understand. Love might have made you—this—possible, but it didn't come. It didn't come, Albert."

He reached for his coat to plunge into it.

"I'm going across for your mother and father. I'm afraid of you. There is something behind all this. One of us is crazy!"

"No, no, Albert. Please, not them. I'll run out of the house if they come. They've defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect—out of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They've killed me with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I've never ceased paying up for being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me—clothe me—feed me—what does parenthood mean but that? Don't you dare to call them over! Don't you dare!"

"In God's name, then, what!"

"Just let me go, Albert—quietly."

"Where?"

She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.

"I've thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since—this. I'll go quietly; I'll take the blame. In these cases where a woman leaves it becomes desertion—"

"If you're talking divorce, I'll see you burn like brimstone before I'll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your damn whims."

She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.

"I know, Albert, to you it sounds—worse, probably, than it is. But think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here—in your house—hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go, Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"

He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.

"You won't ruin my name—you won't ruin my name."

"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of desertion—"

Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.

"What are you that I am married to," he cried, "a she-devil? What have
I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?"

He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering down at her.

"Be careful," he said. "By God! be careful when I get my blood up. The woman don't live that can touch my respectability. If you go, you go without a divorce. You're trying to harm me—ruin my life—that's what you are. Ruin my life." And suddenly, before the impulse to strike had traveled down his tightening arm, collapsed weakly, his entire body retched by the dry sobs that men weep. He could so readily arouse her aversion, that even now, with a quick pity for him stinging her eyeballs, she could regard him dispassionately, a certain disgust for him uppermost.

He turned toward her finally with the look of a stricken St. Bernard dog, his lower lids salt-bitten and showing half moons of red flesh.

"What is it, Lilly? What have I failed in? For God's sake tell me and
I'll make it right."

"That's the terrible part, Albert. You haven't failed. You're you. It's something neither of us can control any more than we can control the color of our eyes. It's as if I were a—a problem in chemistry that had reacted differently than was expected and blew off the top of things."

"Bah! the trouble with you women to-day is that you've got an itch that you don't know how to scratch. Well, it's high time for you to learn a way to scratch yours by settling down like a respectable married woman has to." His voice rising and his wrongs red before him: "I wish to God I'd never laid eyes on you. I thought you were more sensible than most and I find you a crazy woman."

"Then, Albert, you don't want a crazy woman for your wife!"

"Ah no, you don't! No, you don't! I've worked like a dog to get where I am. I'm a respected member of this community and I intend to stay one. No woman gets a divorce out of me unless over my dead body. I'm a leader of a Bible class and an officer in my lodge. I wore a plume and gold braid at the funeral of the mayor of this town. I'm first-assistant buyer and I propose to become general manager. I'm a respectable citizen trying to settle down to a respectable home, and, by God! no woman tomfoolery is going to bamboozle me out of it."

She sat with her eyes closed, tears seeping through them, and her fist beating softly into her palm.

"Oh, Albert—Albert—how can I make you understand? My brain is bursting—"

"Lilly," he interrupted, explosively reaching out and closing over her wrist, and sudden perception lifting his voice, "I know! You—you're not well! You're ailing. Women aren't—aren't always quite themselves—at times. You—Lilly—could it be—"

"No! No! No! I'll go mad if you, too, begin to insinuate—that! I'm myself, I tell you. Never more so in my life."

He regarded her through frank and even tender tears, his voice humoring her.

"Of course, you're high strung, Lilly, and a high-strung woman is like a high-strung horse, has to be handled lightly. Don't exert yourself. If—if I'm embarrassing to you—talk to mother. These are the times a girl needs her mother. You go ahead and pick on me to your heart's content. I—I'm a pretty slow kind of fellow about some things. Never been around women enough. Come, it's ten-thirty-six. You need all the sleep you can get. Come, Lilly. Why—I—I've been thick-headed—that's all."

She suffered him to kiss her on the cheek as she turned her face from him.

"Have it your own way," she said, limp with a sudden sense of futility and as if all the reflex resiliency had oozed out of her.

"We're all right together, Lilly. Just don't you worry your head. We'll get adjusted in no time. You and—and mother talk things over to-morrow. I've been a thick-headed old fool. Pshaw! I—Pshaw!"

She moved to the dresser, removing pins until her hair fell shiningly all over her, brushing through its thick fluff and weaving it into two heavy braids over her shoulders. He laid hesitant and rather clumsy hands to its thickness.

"Fine head of hair."

She jumped back as if a pain had stabbed her.

"Don't forget, Albert, to lock the downstairs windows."

He was full of new comprehensions.

"I understand. Take your time to undress, Lilly. I'll be about fifteen minutes locking up, and I want to attach some new safety locks I brought with me. Everything all right?"

"Yes."

"You don't need to keep the light burning."

"I won't."

He opened his lips to say something, but, instead, turned and went out, the closed half of his collar drenched in perspiration.

When he returned, after a generous fifteen minutes, the room was in darkness except for a thin veil of whiteness from the arc light in the street. Between the sweetly new sheets the long, supple mound of Lilly lay along the bed, her bare arms close to her body.

Her breathing was sufficiently deep to simulate sleep. He undressed in the darkness and the silence.

Half the night through he tossed, keeping carefully to the bed edge, and often she heard him sigh out and was conscious that he mopped continually at the back of his hands. Once he whispered her name.

"Lilly—awake?"

She deepened her breathing.

About four o'clock he dozed off, swooning deeply into sleep, his lips opening and a slight snore coming.

She lay with her eyes open to the darkness, letting it lave over her as if it were water and she had drowned in it with her gaze wide.

She felt bathed in a colorless fluid of unreality. Those Swiss window curtains! To what era of her consciousness did their purchase belong? She and her mother had shopped them at Gentle's. They hung now lightly against the darkness. The blond girl who had sold them to her must be sleeping now, too, in this same curious pool of unreality. She lay sunk in a strange pause. Once she propped herself on an elbow, gazing across the street to the blank front of her parents' house. They were sleeping behind that middle upper window, their clothing folded across chairs, as if waiting. How eagerly they would greet their new day of small duties, small pleasures, and small emotions. What gave them the courage to meet the years of days cut off one identical pattern, like a whole regiment of paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper? She began to count. Uncle Buck, five hundred. Grandma Ploag, one hundred. Mamma and papa, one hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty in the bank in her name! Her own little checking account. The tan-bound check book. The new tan valise, monogrammed, L.B.P. The stack of music marked "RÉpertoire." New York! She fell to trembling, forcing herself into rigidity when the figure beside her stirred. She was burning with fever and wanted to plunge from the cool sheets. She could have run a mile—two.

Instead, she lay the long night through, her mind a loom weaving a tapestry of her plan of action, and dawn came up pink, hot, and cloudless.