“Well, it’s needless to say how it ended.  He found me out again—­this time by a chance meeting with me in the street.

“He was in rags, and half starved.  But that didn’t matter now.  All he had to do was to put his hand into my pocket and take what he wanted.  There is no limit, in England, to what a bad husband may do—­as long as he sticks to his wife.  On the present occasion, he was cunning enough to see that he would be the loser if he disturbed me in my employment.  For a while things went on as smoothly as they could.  I made a pretense that the work was harder than usual; and I got leave (loathing the sight of him, I honestly own) to sleep at the place where I was employed.  This was not for long.  The fit took him again, in due course; and he came and made a disturbance.  As before, this was not to be borne by decent people.  As before, they were sorry to part with me.  As before, I lost my place.

“Another woman would have gone mad under it.  I fancy it just missed, by a hair’s breadth, maddening Me.

“When I looked at him that night, deep in his drunken sleep, I thought of Jael and Sisera (see the book of Judges; chapter 4th; verses 17 to 21).  It says, she ’took a nail of the tent, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground:  for he was fast asleep and weary.  So he died.’  She did this deed to deliver her nation from Sisera.  If there had been a hammer and a nail in the room that night, I think I should have been Jael—­with this difference, that I should have done it to deliver myself.

“With the morning this passed off, for the time.  I went and spoke to a lawyer.

“Most people, in my place, would have had enough of the law already.  But I was one of the sort who drain the cup to the dregs.  What I said to him was, in substance, this.  ’I come to ask your advice about a madman.  Mad people, as I understand it, are people who have lost control over their own minds.  Sometimes this leads them to entertaining delusions; and sometimes it leads them to committing actions hurtful to others or to themselves.  My husband has lost all control over his own craving for strong drink.  He requires to be kept from liquor, as other madmen require to be kept from attempting their own lives, or the lives of those about them.  It’s a frenzy beyond his own control, with him—­just as it’s a frenzy beyond their own control, with them. There are Asylums for mad people, all over the country, at the public disposal, on certain conditions.  If I fulfill those conditions, will the law deliver me from the misery of being married to a madman, whose madness is drink?’—­’No,’ says the lawyer.  ’The law of England declines to consider an incurable drunkard as a fit object for restraint, the law of England leaves the husbands and wives of such people in a perfectly helpless situation, to deal with their own misery as they best can.’