Below, in the little cabin allotted to them at the time of their
marriage, Jerome and Lili were quarreling. Jerome looked haggard and
sombre since the death of his baby; but Lili, though she had cried a
good deal and had a dull expression in her eyes sometimes, seemed not
particularly altered.
They were not quarreling violently; it was more the irritability
of fatigue and depressing emotion which found utterance in mutual
dissatisfaction. Now that his little son was gone, Jerome was asking
himself how much longer this farce with Lili would have to be kept up.
Her eyes grew heavier and heavier. Her sumptuous hair was done into a
tight braid down her back. She was already in her bunk, while Jerome sat
glumly on the edge, still in his clothes.
She nodded and half drifted off for a moment; then, as he moved, she
opened her eyes. And she murmured, her voice obscurely troubled and with
no longer the petulant ring it had more or less carried all the evening:
“Jerry....”
“Well?”
“Don’t you care about me at all any more?”
“What did you say?” he demanded bluntly, coming back to his drab present
apparently from very far off.
“Jerry, don’t you remember how you used to tease me to marry you?” she
asked, her heavy eyes making a desperate effort to beam a little.
“Yes, I remember.” And he added, rather dryly: “How could any one forget
a thing like that?”
“I suppose you’re glad it turned out so you couldn’t,” she said
miserably, her words broadening off into an unquenchable yawn which
seemed somehow, half pathetically, a keynote to her whole nature.
“I think,” he replied coldly, though in tones rather melancholy than
bitter, “it’s a good thing for both of us.” And he concluded, getting to
his feet: “I’m going up on deck for a smoke. It’s too stuffy to try to
sleep down here.”
He left her without looking back.