after a silence he said, "This O'Hara. I'm not such a fool as you think, Olivia."
For a long time neither of them said anything, and in the end it was Olivia who spoke, striking straight into the heart of the question. She said, "Anson, would you consider letting me divorce you?"
The effect upon him was alarming. His face turned gray, and the long, thin, oversensitive hands began to tremble. She saw that she had touched him on the rawest of places, upon his immense sense of pride and dignity. It would be unbearable for him to believe that she would want to be rid of him in order to go to another man, especially to a man whom he professed to hold in contempt, a man who had the qualities which he himself did not possess. He could only see the request as a humiliation of his own precious dignity.
He managed to grin, trying to turn the request to mockery, and said, "Have you lost your mind?"
"No, Anson, not for a moment. What I ask is a simple thing. It has been done before."
He did not answer her at once, and began to move about the room in the deepest agitation, a strange figure curiously out of place in the midst of Horace Pentland's exotic, beautiful pictures and chairs and bibelots—as wrong in such a setting as he had been right a month or two earlier among the museum of Pentland family relics.
"No," he said again and again. "What you ask is preposterous! To-morrow when you are less tired you will see how ridiculous it is. No . . . I couldn't think of such a thing!"
She made an effort to speak quietly. "Is it because you don't want to put yourself in such a position?"
"It has nothing to do with that. Why should you want a divorce? We are well off, content, comfortable, happy. . . ."
She interrupted him, asking, "Are we?"
