Rose steadied herself as well as she could.  She simply mustn’t let herself think of things like that.  If she lost her temper she’d have no chance.

“We’ve made a horrible mistake,” she began.  “I don’t suppose it’s either of our faults exactly.  It’s been mine in a way of course, because it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been—­thoughtless and ignorant.  I might have seen it if I’d thought to look.  But I didn’t—­not really, until to-night.”

He wanted to know what the mistake was.  He was still smiling in good-humored amusement over her seriousness.

“It’s pretty near everything,” she said, “about the way we’ve lived—­renting this house in the first place.”

He frowned and flushed.  “Good heavens, child!” he said.  “Can’t you take a joke?  I didn’t mean anything by what I said about the house—­except that—­well, it is a precious, soulful, sacred—­High Church sort of house, and we’re not the sort of people, thank God—­I’ll say it again—­who’d have built it and furnished it for ourselves.  You aren’t right, Rose.  You’re run down and very tired and hypersensitive, or you wouldn’t have spent an evening worrying over a thing like that.”

“You can make jokes about a thing that’s true,” she persisted.  “And it’s true that you’ve hated the way we’ve lived—­the way this house has made us live.—­No, please listen and let me talk.  I can’t help it if my voice chokes up.  My mind’s just as cool as yours and you’ve got to listen.  It isn’t the first time I’ve thought of it.  It’s always made me feel a little unhappy when people have laughed about the ‘new leaf’ you’ve turned over; how ‘civilized’ you’ve got, learning all the new dances and going out all the time and not doing any of the—­wild things you used to do.  In a joking sort of way, people have congratulated me about it, as if it were some sort of triumph of mine.  I haven’t liked it, really.  But I never stopped to think out what it meant.”

“What it does mean,” he said, with a good deal of attention to his cigarette, “is that I’ve fallen in love with you and married you and that things are desirable to me now, because I am in love with you, that weren’t desirable before.  And things that were desirable before, are less so.  I don’t see anything terrible about that.”

“There isn’t,” she said, “when—­when you’re in love with me.”

He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively.  She nodded.

“Because you aren’t in love with me all the time.  And when you aren’t, you must see what I’ve done to you.  You must—­hate me for what I’ve done to you.  I remember the first day we ever talked—­when you laughed at my note-books.  You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart and followed a bundle of hay.  That’s what I’ve made you do.”

His face flushed deep.  He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette into the fire.  “That’s perfectly outrageous nonsense,” he said.  “I won’t listen to it.”