"There's more to it yet. Do you know when you told me you were going away at once for a year, I thought I was broken? I loved you so. It seemed awful to see the gladness and relief in your face at leaving us, getting rid of us for a whole year! I'd been watching you for so long, and seeing you change, and get irritated with it all, and trying to keep young for you when I was tired out. And that night, when I saw how I'd failed, how dead your love was—"
"No; it was never dead, Marie."
"Wasn't it? Was it sleeping, then? Where was it? What was it doing?"
"You see—"
"Oh, yes, I see. I saw, then, how joyfully you shelved us all. You were like a boy let out of school. And I'd worked so hard to keep home happy for you, but you just thought of it as a place of bills and worry and children, presided over by a perpetual asker. That night before you went, do you remember leaving me to mend your things?"
"Yes."
"When you had gone, I cried, and prayed; it didn't do any good. I didn't know women could suffer so—even when the children were born—"
Osborn sprang up. "Don't," he said hurriedly, with visions of anguish in his mind.
"Very well. I don't want to harrow you. I'm only just giving the explanation you asked. A year ago you left me, glad to go, and I thought my heart would break. But it didn't. And it's changed. You've come back—to exact again all the things that husbands do exact. But I don't want you."
She had appalled him.