matter with me."

Although countless answers leaped to his wife's tongue she made
none but the cryptic: "Well, it's no use to discuss it any more
tonight. We both need rest." But all the while that she was
undressing with her usual sure, swift movements, and after she
had finally slipped between the sheets, her mind was racing.

She was soon borne so completely out on the current of her own
thoughts that she forgot Martin's actual presence. She remembered
as if it were yesterday, the afternoon he came to the office and
asked her to marry him. She wondered anew, as she had wondered a
thousand times, if anything other than a wish for a housekeeper
had prompted him. She remembered her misgivings--how she had read
into him qualities which she had believed all these years were
not there. But hadn't her intuition been justified, after all, by
the very man she had seen tonight? Yes, her first feeling, that
he was something finer, still in the rough, had been correct. She
had thought it was his shyness, his unaccustomedness to women
that had made him such a failure as a lover--and all the while it
had been simply that she was not the right woman. When love
touched him, he became a veritable white light.

All these years when he had been so cold, so hard toward her, it
simply was because he disliked her. She remembered the day she
was hurt, and the night her first baby came. Martin's brutality
even now kindled in her a dull blazing anger, and as she realized
what depths of feeling were in him, his callousness seemed
intensified an hundred-fold. Well, she was having her revenge.
All his life he had thwarted her, stolen from her, used her as