One clearly had a right to time for reflection, after having read such a
letter as this. I turned the sheet over and over in my hands, re-reading
lines here and there under pretence of study, and preserving silence,
until finally she asked me what I thought of it all. Then I had perforce
to speak my mind.

"I think, if you wish to know," I said, deliberately, "that this husband
of yours is the most odious brute God ever allowed to live!"

There came now in her reply a curious confirmation of the familiar saying,
that no man can ever comprehend a woman. A long life's experience has
convinced me that the simplest and most direct of her sex must be, in the
inner workings of her mind, an enigma to the wisest man that ever existed;
so impressed am I with this fact that several times in the course of this
narrative I have been at pains to disavow all knowledge of why the women
folk of my tale did this or that, only recording the fact that they did do
it; and thus to the end of time, I take it, the world's stories must
be written.

This is what Daisy actually said:

"But do you not see running through every line of the letter, and but
indifferently concealed, the confession that he is sorry for what he has
done, and that he still loves me?"

"I certainly see nothing of the kind!"

She had the letter by heart. "Else why does he wish me to return to his
home?" she asked. "And you see he is grieved at my having been friendly
with those who are not his friends; that he would not be if he cared