and open up the wonders of the world to her.  It’s rough on chaps like you, that with all your cleverness you’ve no instinct to set you right on a point like this—­but it is lucky for women like me—­at times!  You were determined to force all this out of me, so you may as well hear the whole brutal truth.  I’m sick of our stupid ways of life—­I have been sick of it for a long time.  I’ve passed all power to pretend any longer.  I have learned that there is a great and beautiful world within the reach of women who are clever enough and brave enough to grasp at an opportunity, without looking forward or back.  I want to walk boldly to this.  I’m not afraid of the stepping-stones!  This is really all your fault.  When you married me, five years ago, I was only sixteen, and very much in love with you.  Now, why didn’t you make me do the housework and drudge as all the other women on the farms about yours did?  I’d have done it then, and willingly, even to the washing and scrubbing.  I had been working in a cotton mill.  I didn’t know anything better than to drudge.  I thought that was a woman’s lot.  It didn’t even seem terrible to me.  But no—­you set yourself to amuse me.  You brought me way up to town on a wedding journey.  For the first time in my life I saw there idle women in the world, who wore soft clothes and were always dressed up.  You bought me finery.  I was clever and imitative.  I pined for all the excitement and beauty of city life when we were back on the farm, in the life you loved.  I cried for it, as a child cries for the moon.  I never dreamed of getting it.  And you surprised me by selling the farm, and coming nearer the town to live.  Just because I had an ear for music, and could pick out tunes on the old melodeon, I must have a piano and take lessons.  Just because my music teacher happened to be French and I showed an aptitude for studying, that must be gratified.  Can you really blame me if I want to see more of the wide world that opened up to me?  Did you really think French novels and music were likely to make a woman of my lively imagination content with her lot as wife of a mechanic—­however clever?”

The man looked down at her as if stunned.  Arguments of that sort were a bit above the reasoning of the simple masculine animal, who seemed to belong to that race which comprehends little of the complex emotions, and looks on love as the one inevitable passion of life, and on marriage as its logical result and everlasting conclusion.

It was probable at this moment that he completed his alphabet in the great lesson of life—­and spelled out painfully the awful truth, that not all the royal service of worship and love in a man’s heart can hold a woman.

There was something akin to a sob in his throat as he replied:  “You were so young—­so pretty!  I could not bear to think that you should soil your hands for me!  I wanted to make up to you for all the hardships and sorrows of your childhood.  I dreamed of being mother and father as well as husband to you.  I thought it would make you happy to owe everything to me—­as happy as it made me to give.  I would willingly have carried you every step of your life, rather than you should have tired your feet.  Is that a sin in a woman’s eyes?”