From her lowly seat on the fender, Toni looked up at him with a strange expression in her eyes. In truth, at that moment Toni's soul was a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Anger, defiance, resentment at what she considered her husband's injustice, were mingled with a great dread of Owen's displeasure; and a wild, miserable despair at the thought of his conception of her as indifferent to his aims and ideals. At one and the same moment she longed to hurl defiance into his face, and to cast herself, weeping, into his arms. But she did neither, only looked up at him with that inscrutable expression in her eyes, waiting for him to speak.
"Now I suppose I shall have to look out for another secretary." Owen was annoyed and showed it. "Thank Heaven, the proofs are about finished, but this knocks the play on the head. I suppose I'll find someone else to help me, but the whole thing is very absurd and annoying."
Suddenly Toni's self-control, already shaken by the meeting with Dowson, deserted her completely.
She rose from her seat like a small whirlwind and confronted Owen with scarlet cheeks and blazing eyes.
"Wait a moment, Owen. Don't say any more, please. Remember there is my side of the question to be considered." She faced him bravely. "You knew from the start that I was not literary or learned—I told you before we were married that I wasn't half clever enough for you, and you said it didn't matter. Then, when I'd tried to help you and failed, you got Miss Loder here in my place. You knew I disliked her, but you didn't know what cause I had for my dislike."
Owen, silenced by her vehemence, stared at her speechlessly, and she went on hurriedly.
"From the first she despised me. She saw I wasn't well-educated, that I wasn't even in her class. Oh, I know she is connected with all sorts of people, but she ought not to have let me see so plainly that she looked down on me as a nobody. She never lost a chance of humiliating me. Why, at lunch over and over again I've sat silent while you and she talked. If I ventured to speak, she listened, quite politely, till I had finished, and then went on talking as though I'd not spoken. For days and days I hardly saw you. You were shut up there with her, and I was all alone. I was no one to you, she was everyone. I was your wife, but she was your companion. Everyone noticed how I was left alone; they all knew you ignored me—I was miserable, but you never saw——"
"You—miserable, Toni?" Owen spoke abruptly.
"How could I be anything else? You treated me always as a child—an unreasonable, ignorant child——"
"Well?" Owen interrupted her, but his tone was one meant to conciliate, for suddenly he thought he saw a way to end this deplorable scene. "And aren't you a child? A pretty, engaging child, I grant you—but still——"