"
"Put your cards on the table, then; no fine flights of speech either.
Who are you?"
"I told you from the first I am a married woman, with nothing to be said
against my husband except that he was part of a condition that was
intolerable to me."
"Where is he?"
"West."
"Stage ambition, eh?"
"Yes or--I don't know. Too many ambitions of all kinds crawling over me
like a terrible itch, for God knows what. Fermenting. The grape
fermenting! But I'm quiet now. So quiet that sometimes I think I
wouldn't change it for even the--the singing wine of fulfillment. I
don't think I can make you understand. I seem to have been stretching
all these years for--for something my arm isn't quite long enough to
touch, and now my child--my little girl--"
"You have a child?"
"A little girl."
"How old?"
"Eleven weeks."
He looked at her across a long silence.
"Good God!" he said, and then again, "Good God."
"Yes," she said, watching belated comprehensions flood up into his face,
"that was it."
"You mean you had on your hands that night a--"
"Yes, a three-and-a-half-weeks-old one."
"You were broke?"
"Stony.
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