"To ask you if there is no possible way in which all this unhappiness can be ended decently.""The only decent way of ending it would be that there should be no further interference.Let Rosalie supply the decency by showing me the consideration due from a wife to her husband.The place has been put in order.It was not for my benefit, and I have no money to keep it up.Let Rosalie be provided with means to do it."As he spoke the words he realised that he had opened a way for embarrassing comment.He expected her to remind him that Rosalie had not come to him without money.But she said nothing about the matter.She never said the things he expected to hear.
"You do not want Rosalie for your wife," she went on "but you could treat her courteously without loving her.You could allow her the privileges other men's wives are allowed.
You need not separate her from her family.You could allow her father and mother to come to her and leave her free to go to them sometimes.Will you not agree to that? Will you not let her live peaceably in her own simple way? She is very gentle and humble and would ask nothing more.""She is a fool!" he exclaimed furiously."A fool! She will stay where she is and do as I tell her.""You knew what she was when you married her.She was simple and girlish and pretended to be nothing she was not.
You chose to marry her and take her from the people who loved her.You broke her spirit and her heart.You would have killed her if I had not come in time to prevent it.""I will kill her yet if you leave her," his folly made him say.
"You are talking like a feudal lord holding the power of life and death in his hands," she said."Power like that is ancient history.You can hurt no one who has friends--without being punished."It was the old story.She filled him with the desire to shake or disturb her at any cost, and he did his utmost.If she was proposing to make terms with him, he would show her whether he would accept them or not.He let her hear all he had said to himself in his worst moments--all that he had argued concerning what she and her people would do, and what his own actions would be--all his intention to make them pay the uttermost farthing in humiliation if he could not frustrate them.His methods would be definite enough.He had not watched his wife and Ffolliott for weeks to no end.He had known what he was dealing with.He had put other people upon the track and they would testify for him.He poured forth unspeakable statements and intimations, going, as usual, further than he had known he should go when he began.Under the spur of excitement his imagination served him well.At last he paused.
"Well," he put it to her, "what have you to say?""I?" with the remote intent curiosity growing in her eyes.
"I have nothing to say.I am leaving you to say things.""You will, of course, try to deny----" he insisted.
"No, I shall not.Why should I?"
"You may assume your air of magnificence, but I am dealing with uncomfortable factors." He stopped in spite of himself, and then burst forth in a new order of rage."You are trying some confounded experiment on me.What is it?"She rose from her chair to go out of the room, and stood a moment holding her book half open in her hand.
"Yes.I suppose it might be called an experiment," was her answer."Perhaps it was a mistake.I wanted to make quite sure of something.""Of what?"
"I did not want to leave anything undone.I did not want to believe that any man could exist who had not one touch of decent feeling to redeem him.It did not seem human."White dints showed themselves about his nostrils.
"Well, you have found one," he cried."You have a lashing tongue, by God, when you choose to let it go.But Icould teach you a good many things, my girl.And before Ihave done you will have learned most of them."But though he threw himself into a chair and laughed aloud as she left him, he knew that his arrogance and bullying were proving poor weapons, though they had done him good service all his life.And he knew, too, that it was mere simple truth that, as a result of the intellectual, ethical vagaries he scathingly derided--she had actually been giving him a sort of chance to retrieve himself, and that if he had been another sort of man he might have taken it.
