"His? Whose?" Toni was flustered, or she would never have betrayed herself so utterly.
"Whose?" Owen, his nerves strained almost to breaking point by his bodily pain, spoke irritably, and Toni shrank miserably into her chair. "Why, Toni, have you never heard of the poet Rossetti? Good Heavens, child, don't you ever open a book?"
She said nothing, though the tears welled slowly into her eyes; and Owen went on reading, finding still further evidences of his wife's lack of acquaintance with the giants of literature as he read.
In an ordinary way he would have let her down gently. After all it is no crime to confuse two poets of the same name; and to "correct" a quotation by transposing two words into a more ordinary sequence is not a very heinous offence; but to Owen, racked with pain, the whole affair was an instance of the most flagrant ignorance, and he let fly one or two biting sarcasms as he bent over the papers, which reduced Toni to a state of trembling, impotent misery.
To do him justice Owen repented as soon as he had spoken, and when he saw how he had hurt her, he threw aside the proof-sheets and devoted himself to making amends for his harshness.
He succeeded finally in winning back something of her usual serenity; but to both the incident was oddly discomposing; to Toni because for the first time she saw the critic in the husband, and trembled to think how often she must fall short of his high standard; to Owen because the affair seemed to open up such vast tracts of ignorance in the woman who was his wife, and showed, more clearly than ever before, the dividing line between intellect and ordinary shrewdness.
For just one illuminating moment he saw Toni as she was; a pretty, winning, half-educated little girl, to whom the world of art and literature was a sphere apart, its shibboleths mere meaningless babble in her ears, its greatest exponents but so many confusing names, divorced from any enlightening personalities.
Where, he asked himself half desperately, was there any common meeting ground for two beings so widely diverse as they, husband and wife though they were? Surely they were as widely sundered as the poles....
And then the sight of Toni's face, her eyes filled with tears, her childish mouth quivering, lighted a sudden flame in his heart which consumed, for the time being, all doubts and petty vexations. After all, she was only a child—and she loved him; and so he took her in his arms and kissed away the tears with a remorseful tenderness which might well pass—with an uncritical being like Toni—for love.
But Toni was not thinking of that dreadful episode on this brilliant June morning. Rather she was trying to realize that she was the mistress of this beautiful place, that Greenriver, with its grounds, its flowers, its lofty rooms, was to be her home; and to the girl who had lived in Winter Road, Brixton, Greenriver was indeed a revelation.