'You are simply doing him a monstrous injustice,' said Warren, with a sudden abatement of sarcasm in his tone and manner, and a not unsuccessful assumption of hurt-feeling, of deferential explanatoriness; 'you are imputing that which is in the nature of the man to an external influence. Griswold is a very good fellow, and my best friend; but his notions of women, all his theories about them, differ from mine widely. He believes in the intellectual inferiority of women as he believes in their physical beauty, and likes it as much. Long before he married you, he told me a clever woman was, to his mind, an anomaly, and a clever wife a nuisance; that he did not believe any woman in the world could understand business or hold her tongue; and he meant to conduct his domestic relations, if he ever found any, on Hotspur's theory, and, while giving his wife all due credit for discretion, making sure that she "would not tell that which she did not know." This root of bitterness was none of my planting, nor have I watered it. You have spoken with harsh frankness to me, Mrs. Griswold; let me speak with frankness that shall not be harsh to you. I have contemplated your domestic life with pain--' 'Indeed, and why? It is an unenviable one.' 'So you believe, because you have little experience and an unawakened heart. If you only knew what home might be, and love, the love of a man to whom you would be more than the fairest of women, the dearest of friends, the most trusted of counsellors, the sharer of every feeling, the companion of every thought! Would not that be the ideal of earthly happiness?' His voice had become low, tender, and persuasive, and his words had a strange influence on Helen. She seemed to forget _him_, to be conscious of them only, to have been sent by them into a dream. 'Happiness more than earthly,' she said, as if to herself, hardly knowing that she spoke. 'Such happiness might have been yours. Be honest, be patient, be true with yourself and with me, and you must acknowledge that it could never have come with your marriage with Griswold. He is the best of fellows, but it is not in him to appreciate you. You are a woman for a man to love with his whole mind and with all the strength of his pride. If fate had made you _my_ wife you would have been so loved.' He moved a step nearer to her, and stepped before her, looking at her with eyes whose gaze she dared not meet. 'You may as well hear me out,' he went on, with a tremor in his voice; 'since your ill-placed suspicions have forced me to clear myself from the charge which you have brought against me, it is fair that you should listen to me. When you believed that I was estranging Griswold from you, undervaluing you to him, I was tortured with envy of his lot, and silent about you because I dared not speak to my friend of his wife lest he should--slow as his mind is, except when business is concerned--suspect that I loved her.'