“Now I suppose he has—explained,” said Mr. Brumley slowly and with infinite distaste. “Lady Harman, what has he explained?”
“It isn’t so much that he has explained, Mr. Brumley,” said Lady Harman, “as that things have explained themselves.”
“But how, Lady Harman? How?”
“I mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when I married him. Naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to me. And quite as naturally he didn’t notice that now I am a woman, grown up altogether. And it’s been necessary to do things. And naturally, Mr. Brumley, they shocked and upset him. But he sees now so clearly, he wrote to me, such a fair letter—an unusual letter—quite different from when he talks—it surprised me, telling me he wanted me to feel free, that he meant to make me—to arrange things that is, so that I should feel free and more able to go about as I pleased. It was a generous letter, Mr. Brumley. Generous about all sorts of affairs that there had been between us. He said things, quite kind things, not like the things he has ever said before——”
She stopped short and then began again.
“You know, Mr. Brumley, it’s so hard to tell things without telling other things that somehow are difficult to tell. Yet if I don’t tell you them, you won’t know them and then you won’t be able to understand in the least how things are with us.”
Her eyes appealed to him.
“Tell me,” he said, “whatever you think fit.”
“When one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they aren’t. It alters everything.”
He nodded, watching her.