"Wait a moment, Owen. Don't say any more, please. Remember there is my side of the question to be considered." She faced him bravely. "You knew from the start that I was not literary or learned--I told you before we were married that I wasn't half clever enough for you, and you said it didn't matter. Then, when I'd tried to help you and failed, you got Miss Loder here in my place. You knew I disliked her, but you didn't know what cause I had for my dislike." Owen, silenced by her vehemence, stared at her speechlessly, and she went on hurriedly. "From the first she despised me. She saw I wasn't well-educated, that I wasn't even in her class. Oh, I know she is connected with all sorts of people, but she ought not to have let me see so plainly that she looked down on me as a nobody. She never lost a chance of humiliating me. Why, at lunch over and over again I've sat silent while you and she talked. If I ventured to speak, she listened, quite politely, till I had finished, and then went on talking as though I'd not spoken. For days and days I hardly saw you. You were shut up there with her, and I was all alone. I was no one to you, she was everyone. I was your wife, but she was your companion. Everyone noticed how I was left alone; they all knew you ignored me--I was miserable, but you never saw----" "You--miserable, Toni?" Owen spoke abruptly. "How could I be anything else? You treated me always as a child--an unreasonable, ignorant child----" "Well?" Owen interrupted her, but his tone was one meant to conciliate, for suddenly he thought he saw a way to end this deplorable scene. "And aren't you a child? A pretty, engaging child, I grant you--but still----" "No." It was her turn to interrupt, and white to the lips she faced him. "I am not a child any longer--I was until a short time ago, but you have changed me into a woman----" "Come, Toni." Deceived by her quiet tone Owen laid his hand on her arm. "Don't grow up too quickly. Let me have my little child-wife a bit longer yet----" She shook his hand off with a violence for which he was not prepared, and he spoke angrily, his softer impulses dying away. "Hang it all, Toni, you needn't repulse me as if I were a snake. You _are_ a child, after all, and a jolly bad-tempered one at that!" It was the first time he had ever used such a tone, and the girl's anger flared up in reply. "A child--of course--you think so, you always will--you and your precious secretary!" As she spoke Toni snatched up a packet of neatly-folded proofs from the table behind her. "This is her work, I suppose. Oh, how I _hate_ her--and you--and the book! I'd like to destroy it all--to burn it up--like that!" With a passionate gesture she turned round and flung the bundle of papers into the very heart of the fire blazing on the hearth behind her.