ady Harman,
"as that things have explained themselves."

"But how, Lady Harman? How?"

"I mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when I married him.
Naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to
me. And quite as naturally he didn't notice that now I am a woman, grown
up altogether. And it's been necessary to do things. And naturally, Mr.
Brumley, they shocked and upset him. But he sees now so clearly, he
wrote to me, such a fair letter--an unusual letter--quite different from
when he talks--it surprised me, telling me he wanted me to feel free,
that he meant to make me--to arrange things that is, so that I should
feel free and more able to go about as I pleased. It was a _generous_
letter, Mr. Brumley. Generous about all sorts of affairs that there had
been between us. He said things, quite kind things, not like the things
he has ever said before----"

She stopped short and then began again.

"You know, Mr. Brumley, it's so hard to tell things without telling
other things that somehow are difficult to tell. Yet if I don't tell you
them, you won't know them and then you won't be able to understand in
the least how things are with us."

Her eyes appealed to him.

"Tell me," he said, "whatever you think fit."

"When one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much
stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they
aren't. It alters everything."

He nodded, watching her.

Her voice fell nearly to a whisper. "Mr. Brumley," she said, "when I
came back to him--you know he was in bed here--instead of scolding
me--he _cried_. He cried like a vexed child. He put his face into the
pillow--just misery.... I'd never seen him cry--at least only once--long
ago...."

Mr. Brumley looked at her flushed and tender face and it seemed to him
that indeed he could die for her quite easily.

"I saw how hard I had been," she said. "In prison I'd thought of that,
I'd thought women mustn't be hard, whatever happens to them. And when I
saw him like that I knew at once how true that was.... He begged me to
be a good wife to him. No!--he just said, 'Be a wife to me,' not even a
good wife--and then he cried...."

For a moment or so Mr. Brumley didn't respond. "I see," he said at last.
"Yes."

"And there were the children--such helpless little things. In the prison
I worried about them. I thought of things for them. I've come to
feel--they are left too much to nurses and