"Because you did not love me," she repeated. "Your anger shows that you are trying to deny the truth to yourself. You married me on an impulse of passion. Oh, you had the usual romantic deceptive names for it—the words that make the man feel spiritual and tickle the girl's vanity. But you've shown what it really was by giving me only an incidental—carnal thought now and then. That's been our married life."
"Why did you not tell me you had these false, unjust ideas?"
"But they're not false, not unjust," she rejoined. "What do you know of me except my outside? What's my mind like? What's my heart like? What do I, a human being like yourself, think and feel? You don't know. You've lived on your grandfather's pompous old-fashioned ideal—that lust is love, if the preacher has christened it—that a woman's whole life is the good pleasure of her husband's various appetites."
She paused for breath. She was not so carried away by the tempest of her emotions that she did not note that he was listening and thinking. He presently said: "Even so, how does that excuse you?—you, the mother of Winchie."
She paled, and her hands clasped convulsively in her lap. But she went boldly on. "I had a heart and a mind, like you. How could a human being live the life you assigned me? When I pleaded for a share in your life you refused. When I begged for freedom you refused. What I did was my compromise between the woman and the mother. A mother isn't less a woman, Richard, but more."
He rose in his excitement; for, his keen mind penetrated to her purpose. "You want your freedom and you want my son!" he cried.
Her gaze was steady but her deep voice trembled as she answered, "I want my freedom and I want my child—the child I brought into the world—the child I've watched over from birth. Be fair—be just, Richard. What have you done for him except provide the home the law would have compelled? You've amused yourself playing with him a few minutes now and then. You've asked me to buy him a present now and then. And never even inquired whether I'd done it. Do you know his birthday? Do you know how old he is? Do you know anything about him? Why then do you call him your son?"
He had been in such struggle with his fury that he was unable to check her torrent of half-defiant half-piteous appeal. He now mastered himself sufficiently to say, "How dare you talk to me like this?"
"Because," replied she, quick as a flash, "I respect your intelligence, even if you don't respect mine. You asked me to speak freely. I've done it. Would you have preferred me to lie to you?"
He walked away from her to the edge of the lake, immediately returned and sat again at the other end of the bench. He eyed her passive figure—hands quiet in her lap, gaze upon the town across the lake. Her face was quiet, but all the intelligence and character which her gayety and small stature and young loveliness veiled from unobservant eyes were clearly revealed now. "It's a succession of blows, these discoveries that you are so different from what I imagined," said he. With bitter reproach, "When I think how I exalted, how I idealized you!"