ok it
quietly.

"We never exactly quarrelled," he said. "At least, that isn't quite
true. We did disagree, more than once, on one particular subject; and
last night we certainly had a few words. We both lost our tempers--I
confess I lost mine--and I said one or two things I'd have given the
world to recall afterwards."

"I see." Herrick spoke gravely. "Well, no doubt Mrs. Rose knows you did
not mean anything unkind----"

"I hope so. By God, I hope so." Owen's voice was hoarse. "If I thought
Toni had taken my words seriously I--why, I said things I didn't mean in
the very least, and I never for one instant dreamed she would take them
as spoken in earnest."

"I see." Herrick repeated the words. "You will pardon me for saying that
Mrs. Rose always struck me as being more sensitive than the majority of
women."

"Did she?" Owen stared at him, struck suddenly by the significance of
his manner. "By Jove, Herrick, I never suspected my wife of any undue
sensitiveness. She always seemed to me too young, too immature and
undeveloped to take things much to heart. Her youth was one of the
greatest charms about her to me. It never struck me she was a woman,
capable of a woman's sufferings----"

He broke off suddenly.

"Stay, though. Once I thought--she looked at me and I thought her
eyes looked different--not like the eyes of a child. I wondered
then ... but ... oh, no, she couldn't think I meant the things I said.
Once or twice I have felt exasperated at what I thought was her
childishness, her ignorance of the world, and I've said things now and
again, unkind things, even cruel things sometimes ... but I've been
secure all the time in the thought that she didn't understand...."

"You wouldn't have hurt her--wilfully?"

"Hurt her?" Owen stared at him. "Good God, man, what do you take me for?
A man doesn't wilfully hurt his wife--the woman he loves. And to hurt
Toni would be like hurting a child."

"Mr. Rose"--Herrick took a resolution to speak plainly--"are you sure
you did not treat your wife rather too much as a child? Are you sure you
didn't deny her the right of a woman, the right to share your life, your
work, your aims? Are you quite sure you never made her feel her
inferiority to you in different ways, never let her see that in some
matters she was perhaps hardly your equal? Oh, I know you are
exceptionally clever, brilliant, and she is only a simple girl; but
still she was not a child; and it may have been rath