He was desperately afraid that her anger would dissolve in tears, and he be placed in a position from which he was not sure of emerging with a clear conscience,—­and he dared take home nothing less.  But Mrs. Croix, however she might feel on the morrow, was too outraged in her pride and vanity to be susceptible either to grief or the passion of love.  She stormed up and down the room in increasing fury, her eyes flashing blue lightning, her strong hands smashing whatever costly offering they encountered.  “Wives!  Wives!  Wives!” she screamed.  “The little fools!  What are wives for but to keep house and bring up babies?  They are a class apart.  I have suffered enough from their impertinent interference.  Am I not a woman apart?  Will you assert that there is a ‘wife’ in America who can hold her own with me for a moment in anything?  Was I not created to reveal to men—­and only the ablest, for I waste no time on fools—­the very sublimation of my sex—­a companionship they will find in no silly little fool, stupid with domesticity?  Am I to submit, then, to be baulked by a sex I despise—­and in the greatest passion that ever possessed a woman?” She stopped and laughed, bringing her lashes together and moving forward her beautiful lips.  “What a fool I am!” she said.  “You will come back when the humour seizes you.  I had forgot that your family returned to-day.  You are in your most domestic mood—­and I have been inflicted with that before.  But there will come an hour when neither your wife nor any other mortal power will keep you away from me.  Is it not true?”

Hamilton had turned pale; his ready imagination had responded with a presentiment of many desperate struggles.  He rose, and took her hand forcibly.

“No,” he said.  “I shall not return.  Believe me, that is the hardest sentence I have ever pronounced upon myself.  And forgive me if I have been rude and inconsiderate.  It was the result of the desire to have the agony over as quickly as possible.  I should have found the anticipation unbearable, and I do not believe it would have been more soothing to you.  There is no reason why your pride should be wounded, for this is not the result of satiety on my part, but of an imperative necessity.  Shake hands with me.”

She wrenched her hand free and, seizing a vase, flung it into a mirror.  Hamilton retreated.

XXXVI

He had been gone just thirty-five minutes, Betsey received him with stern approval and announced that she had implicit faith in his promise to avoid Mrs. Croix in the future.  But it was quite evident that his punishment was unfinished, and with due humility and some humour he bided her pleasure.  Between the two women he had a lively month.  Mrs. Croix wrote him a letter a day.  At first it was evident that she had taken herself in hand, that her pen was guided by her marvellous intelligence.  She apologized charmingly for her exhibition of temper, and for any