looked at the boy with pathetic wistfulness.

"Don't you see, Doug, that I couldn't make her understand? She's still
such a child she'd just laugh at me."

"Child!" scoffed Douglas, forgetting his own previous estimate of Judith.
"She knows a whole lot more than you do!"

Mary laughed drearily. "Now you're talking like a child!" Then her voice
cleared with unwonted purposefulness. "No one who hasn't been married can
possibly understand men, or fear them or despise them, like they ought to
be feared and despised. When I think what I was before I married and what
I am now, I feel like I wanted to put Judith where she never could see a
man. It's not right that a woman should suffer so. It's not right to lose
all your dreams like I've lost mine. Marriage was never meant to be so."

Douglas scowled in his astonishment. Mary had been feeling like this all
along when he'd been thinking of her as without nerve! Here, then, was
somebody else lonely, like himself and Judith.

"I'm sorry, Mother," he said awkwardly. "I'll do what I can to change
it."

"You can't do anything, my dear. What I'm suffering is in the nature of
things."

"Well, anyhow, you ought to warn Jude," repeated Douglas.

"I can't!" said Mary. "Doug, if I do she'd guess how cowardly I am and
how I suffer--in my mind, I mean," and she put her hands over her face