His answer was an evasion, and she knew it. "I'm staying home to
see some men. That's all."

But the moment's fear was too stressful to be so easily set at
rest. "Wait--do you hear?" She slipped from the bed, and, with
her eyes still fastened on him she groped about till she found
her down slippers. Willoughby had slowly opened the door, but his
wife angrily reached over his shoulder and pushed it shut. "You
SHALL tell me!" she insisted, fiercely determined. "I want to
know what's happened."

Willoughby shook off her hand, and renewed his effort at the
door. "I've nothing to tell you," he rumbled sullenly; and
then--"What do you want to know for?"

She caught her breath, certain now of the fear that shook her
like an ague. He was in trouble, and trouble, to her, meant but
the one thing--a money trouble. It was the first time in her
years of placid, self-possessed vanity that any terror like this
had come to jar her. To lose it now--this bought and paid-for
complacency, this counterpart of happiness, struck her to the
heart with a keener, more convincingly human emotion than she had
known for many a day in her negligent, shallow existence.

"You want to know?" he answered, and smiled at her in grim,
accusing mockery. "All right, then; I'll tell you. You'd better
be ready for it, too." In his brutality there was a guarded note
of self-pity, as if to see her suffer would somehow rejoice him
in his own trouble. "Well, I'm smashed up--that's all. I'm
ruined!"