“Look here, Lalage,” he said, keeping up with her as she walked:  “this is all rot.  I didnt mean to offend you.  I dont know what you mean, or what you want me to do.  Dont be so unreasonable.”

No answer.

“I can stand a good deal from you; but it’s too much to be kept at your heels as if I were a beggar or a troublesome dog. Lalage.”  She took no notice of him; and he stopped, trying to compose his features, which were distorted by rage.  She walked on, turning into Glasshouse Street.  When she had gone twenty yards, she heard him striding behind her.

“If you wont stop and talk to me,” he said, “I’ll make you.  If anybody interferes with me I’ll smash him into jelly.  It would serve you right if I did the same to you.”

He put his hand on her arm; and she instantly turned and struck him across the face, knocking off his hat.  He, who a moment before had been excited, red, and almost in tears, was appalled.  There was a crowd in a moment; and a cabman drew up close to the kerb with a calm conviction that his hansom would be wanted presently.

“How dare you put your hand on me, you coward?” she exclaimed, with remarkable crispness of utterance and energy of style.  “Who are you?  I dont know you.  Where are the police?” She paused for a reply; and a bracelet, broken by the blow she had given him, dropped on the pavement, and was officiously picked up and handed to her by a battered old woman who shewed in every wrinkle her burning sympathy with Woman turning at bay against Man.  Susanna looked at the broken bracelet, and tears of vexation sprang to her eyes.  “Look at what youve done!” she cried, holding out the bracelet in her left hand and shewing a scrape which had drawn blood on her right wrist.  “For two pins I’d knock your head off!”

Marmaduke, quite out of countenance, and yet sullenly very angry, vacillated for a moment between his conflicting impulses to knock her down and to fly to the utmost ends of the earth.  If he had been ten years older he would probably have knocked her down:  as it was, he signed to the cabman, who gathered up the reins and held them clear of his fare’s damaged hat with the gratification of a man whose judgment in a delicate matter had just been signally confirmed by events.

As they started, Susanna made a dash at the cab, which was pulled up, amid a shout from the crowd, just in time to prevent an accident.  Then, holding on to the rail and standing on the step, she addressed herself to the cabman, and, sacrificing all propriety of language to intensity of vituperation, demanded whether he wanted to run his cab over her body and kill her.  He, with undisturbed foresight, answered not a word, but again shifted the reins so as to make way for her bonnet.  Acknowledging the attention with one more epithet, she seated herself in the cab, from which Marmaduke at once indignantly rose to escape.  But the hardiest Grasmere wrestler, stooping under the hood of a hansom, could not resist a vigorous pull at his coat tails; and Marmaduke was presently back in his seat again, with Susanna clinging to him and half sobbing: