Rose was silent a little. "You didn't give it?"
"I turned it off—I refused to take any such discussion seriously. I said: 'My own darling, how can I meet you on so hateful a basis? Wait till you are dying!'" He lost himself an instant; then he was again on his feet. "How in the world can she dream I'm capable ———?" He hadn't patience even to finish his phrase.
Rose, however, finished it. "Of taking a second wife? Ah, that's another affair!" she sadly exclaimed. "We've nothing to do with that," she added. "Of course you understand poor Julia's feeling."
"Her feeling?" Tony once more stood in front of her.
"Why, what's at the bottom of her dread of your marrying again."
"Assuredly I do! Mrs. Grantham naturally—she's at the bottom. She has filled Julia with the vision of my perhaps giving our child a stepmother."
"Precisely," Rose said, "and if you had known, as I knew it, Julia's girlhood, you would do justice to the force of that horror. It possesses her whole
