Then—
"Look here, Herrick," he said, "I believe you are trying to tell me something—something about my wife which I don't know. Well, what is it? I think, as her husband, I have a right to ask you to share your knowledge with me. What do you say?"
"I think you have every right," Herrick answered quietly, "and I ask nothing better than to tell you all I know."
Without further preliminaries he repeated to Owen the conversation he had had with Toni on the day of the Vicarage Bazaar; and a sudden light broke over Owen as he listened.
"You are alluding to the occasion when Lady Martin and the Vicar's wife called her ignorant, frivolous, empty-headed."
"She told you?" Herrick was surprised.
"Yes—long afterwards. But I laughed at her and told her it was nonsense—jealousy, or something like that. I never dreamed she had taken it to heart."
"She took it so much to heart that she began to wonder how much was true, and how she could best rise above the defects with which they endowed her. She honoured me by asking my advice; and I was only too glad to help her. She called herself ignorant, and I endeavoured to show her how, by study and application, she might repair that ignorance. I recommended her books, mapped her out a course of reading—oh, it's no use going over it all now; only just what seems important to me is this. What had specially wounded her was the fact that they had evidently denied her the possession of a soul." He smiled rather tenderly. "And it was her passionate desire to show that she had a soul which drove her to all those desperate expedients of study and the like."
He paused, but Owen did not speak.
"I wonder if the process of making one's soul is a painful one, after all? Like most new-born creatures, I expect it's a delicate, sensitive thing at first, easily wounded by a word, a glance.... I don't suppose it has a very joyful time in the beginning, struggling towards the fuller light like a weak, fragile little flower opening its petals one by one to the sun. But luckily a soul is a very vital thing. It can stand a good deal in the way of unkindness or neglect without shrivelling up. And I daresay a few kindly words, a sympathetic thought, are like water to a dying plant—or as the Bible has it 'as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.'"