His expression showed how he was touched by her air of sad thoughtfulness as she gazed across the glistening level of ice. "Not at all," said he. "While nothing's been said about it, you must know that as Winchie's mother——"
She interrupted him with a laugh that made the color flare into his face. "So, you thought I was hinting, did you? I don't suppose you ever will be able to understand a woman. No—I don't hint."
"I didn't suspect——"
"Be honest!"
He hung his head like a foolish boy.
"As I was saying," she went on, "I've got to do something because, when I'm free, I want to feel free. Maybe I'm flying in the face of nature, but I've a hankering for the same sort of independence a man has—not the same, but the same sort.... It isn't a bit nice, being a woman—if one wakens to the fact that she's in the same market—if in a higher grade stall—with 'those others.'"
He looked up with a frown. "That's not the way to look at it," he protested with more than a touch of his old-time dictatorial manner.
"It's the way I look at it," replied she, quietly. That reminder of his tyranny, added to his unconsciously contemptuous suspicion that she was hinting for alimony, had stirred all her latterly latent antagonism to him—made her doubt the sincerity—or, rather, the thoroughness of the change in him. She began to move away. "I must go tell Jimmie what to do about this tree."
"Please—not just yet," he said, red and embarrassed. "I beg your pardon for taking that tone. And I'll admit you're right, though I'd like to be able to deny it. Still, it's not your fault that you were brought up in the customary way——"
"I don't want to be reminded of that," she interrupted, rather bitterly. "In spite of all I've been through—and of the certainty that unless I free myself, I'll have to go through it again—I'm having a constant fight against my cowardice." Her face changed in an instant from grave to gay. "I'm saying and doing all sorts of things to make it impossible for me to back down. I guess telling you was one of them."