So the days passed, and each day Eleanor dredged her silences, to find words: "What shall I say to him?" for of course she must say _something_! She must "have it out with him," as the phrase is. Sometimes she would decide to burst into a statement of the fact: "Somebody called 'L. D.' has a claim upon you, because she sends for you when 'Jacky' is sick. I am certain that 'Jacky' is your child! I am certain that 'L.D.' is Mrs. Dale. I am certain that you don't love me...." And he would say--Then her heart would stand still: What _would_ he say? He would say, "I stopped loving you _because you are old_." And to that would come her own terrible assent: "I had no right to marry him--he was only nineteen. I had no right..." (Thus did that new-born sense of her own complicity in Maurice's sin raise its feeble voice!) And little by little the Voice became stronger: "I didn't make him happy _not_ because I was old, but because I was selfish...." So, in alternating gusts of anger and fear, and outraged pride,--and self-forgetting horror for Maurice,--her soul began to awake. Again and again she counted the reasons why he had not been happy, beginning with the obvious reason, his youth and her age: But that did not explain it. "We had no children." That did not explain it! Nor, "I wasn't a good housekeeper"; nor, "I didn't do things with him ... I didn't skate, and walk, and joke with him"; nor, "I didn't entertain him. Auntie always said men must be entertained. I--I am stupid." There was no explanation in such things; neither dullness nor inefficiency was enough to drive a man like Maurice Curtis into dishonor or faithlessness! Then came the real explanation--which jealousy so rarely puts into words: "_I was selfish._" At first, this bleak truthfulness was only momentary. Almost immediately she was swept from the noble pain of knowing that Maurice had been false to himself; swept from the sense of her own share in that falseness, swept back to the insult to _herself_! Back to self-love. With this was the fear that if she accused him, if she told him that she knew he was false to her, if she made him very angry, he would leave her, and go and live with this woman--who had given him a child ... Yet every morning when she got up, she would say to herself, "I'll tell him to-day." And every night when she went to bed, "To-morrow."