"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 rather galling to her to be treated as one."
For a moment Owen sat motionless, his eyes fixed on the other man's face with a stare whose earnestness was its justification.