wife. I might do much worse. I am sorry that she can't have more children, but that is none of my doing. I do not want to hurt her. I might not have another wife as satisfactory."
To which Thérèse had replied, "She is unhappy. I know she is. She can't stand indifference forever, even if she is a cold woman. Besides she's in love with you. She can't go on always living with you and yet not living with you. She'd be happier free . . . to marry some one else."
Then he had mocked her out of the depths of his own security. "Do you think love is such a simple thing that it can be turned on and off like water from a tap?" (She knew that love with him was just that . . . something which could be turned on and off, like water from a tap.)
"Besides, it was you who wanted me to marry her. I had other ideas."
"You mean Ellen Tolliver?" she asked. And then, "You would not have married her if you could have escaped it . . . if you could have got her in any other way."
But she saw that the look of mockery had faded a little at the sound of the girl's name. (She was of course no longer a girl but a successful woman of thirty or more.)
"I don't know . . ." he had said, "I don't know what I should have done. Only I fancy that if I had married her there would have been a great many little heirs running about."
She had delivered herself into his hands. As a woman of affairs she knew that one could not argue sensibly about what might have happened; and for what had happened she herself was responsible. In that he had been right.
"Would you marry her to-day?"
"How can I answer that? Probably she wouldn't have me. Why should she? We're both different now. . . . It's been years. . . . She's rich now . . . successful . . . famous. It isn't the same."
"People don't change as much as that . . . especially if they not seen each other. They are likely to keep a memory
