said aloud, "is the kind of thing she does when I am delayed.
This is what it means to wait. Men don't do it often enough to know
what it is. I wonder if we have any scale of measurement for what
women suffer?"

What she, for instance, by that time was suffering, oh, who in the wide
world else could guess or dream? There were such suffering cells in
that exquisite nature! Who but me could understand?

I brought my clinched hand down upon the broker's blue blotting-paper,
and laid my heavy head upon it.

Suppose somebody had got the news to her that the horse had been seen
dashing free of the buggy, or had returned alone to the stable, panting
and cut?

Suppose Helen thought that my unaccountable absence had something to do
with that scene between us? Suppose she thought--or if she
suspected--perhaps she imagined--

I hid my face within my shaking hands and groaned. A curse upon the
cruel words that I had spoken to the tenderest of souls, to the dearest
and the gentlest of women! A curse upon the lawless temper that had
fired them! Accursed the hot lips that had uttered them, the unmanly
heart that could have let them slip!

I thought of her face--I really had not thought of her face before,
that wretched night. I had not strictly dared. Now I found that
daring had nothing to do with it. I thought because I had to think. I
dwelt upon her expression when I spoke to her--God forgive me!--as I
did; her attitude, the way her hands fell, her silence, the quiver in
her delicate mouth. I saw the dim parlour, the lighted room beyond
her, the scarlet shade upon the gas; she standing midway, tall and
mute, like a statue carved by one stroke of a sword.

My own words came back to me; and I was not apt to remember things I
said to people. So many impressions passed in and out of my mind in
the course of one busy day, that I became their victim rather than
their master. But now my language to my wife that unhappy evening
returned to my consciousness with incredible vividness and minuteness.
It will be seen from the precision with which I have already recorded
it, how inexorable this minuteness was.

It occurred to me that I might as well have struck her.

In this kind of moral pommelling which sensitive women feel--as they
do--how could I have indulged! I, who knew what a sensitive woman is,
what fearful and wonderful nervous systems these delicate creatures
have to manage; I, with what I was pleased to ter