"Mr. Rose"--Herrick took a resolution to speak plainly--"are you sure you did not treat your wife rather too much as a child? Are you sure you didn't deny her the right of a woman, the right to share your life, your work, your aims? Are you quite sure you never made her feel her inferiority to you in different ways, never let her see that in some matters she was perhaps hardly your equal? Oh, I know you are exceptionally clever, brilliant, and she is only a simple girl; but still she was not a child; and it may have been rather galling to her to be treated as one." For a moment Owen sat motionless, his eyes fixed on the other man's face with a stare whose earnestness was its justification. 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.