And she had forgiven this, both the word and the blow. How strange! She made allowances for his irritation, for his mortification at the discovery by a man so upright, so ascetic, so unsympathetic with any moral weakness as Judge Roscoe. She offered to herself excuses which even she, however, in her inmost soul, hardly accepted--for the lie itself! He desired to avoid reproaches for mistaken arrangements about money matters, she had said to herself; he shrank from contention with her thus. Never dreaming that she might be questioned, he had been led to palliate, to distort the facts. For at first she would have no traffic with the ignoble word "lie." The restrictions of her own phrases began to have a sort of terror for her. She could no longer talk freely. She hardly dared make the most obvious statement concerning any simple fact of household affairs, or amusements, or visits, or friends, lest, in his prodigal untruth, for no reason,--the abandonment of folly, or a momentary whim,--he should have committed himself and her unequivocally to some different effect. She hesitated, stammered, when she was in company,--faltered, blushed,--she who used to be so different!--while all her world stared. And when they were alone, he would storm at her for it, furiously mimicking her distressful uncertainty, her tremulous solicitude lest she openly convict him of lying continually. She sought to give him no occasion for anger, not that she so dreaded the hurt of his heavy hand, but that she might save him from the ignominy of striking his wife. She studied his face and conformed to his whims, and anticipated his wants, and forbore vexation. Her subjection was so obvious that while her own near friends raged inwardly, divining that he was unkind, their casual acquaintance sportively fleered, never dreaming how their arrows sped to the mark. Their fleers nettled him; he was specially out of countenance one day because of a careless shaft of Mildred Fisher's. "It is one of the beautiful aspects of matrimony that the law once recognized the right of a man to correct his wife with 'a stick not thicker than his thumb'; let me see the size of your thumb, Mr. Gwynn,--it must be that which keeps Leonora in this edifying state of subjection." And when she had gayly gone her way, Rufus Gwynn bitterly upbraided his wife. "Damn you!" he had cried; "can't you hold up your head at all?"