“I am not speaking of the law.”

“Well;—­go on, Robert.  I will not interrupt you if I can help it.”

“I am not speaking of the law.  I am speaking simply of convenience, and of that which you must feel to be right.  If I wish that your intercourse with any person should be of such or such a nature it must be best that you should comply with my wishes.”  He paused for her assent, but she neither assented nor dissented.  “As far as I can understand the position of a man and wife in this country, there is no other way in which life can be made harmonious.”

“Life will not run in harmonies.”

“I expect that ours shall be made to do so, Laura.  I need hardly say to you that I intend to accuse you of no impropriety of feeling in reference to this young man.”

“No, Robert; you need hardly say that.  Indeed, to speak my own mind, I think that you need hardly have alluded to it.  I might go further, and say that such an allusion is in itself an insult,—­an insult now repeated after hours of deliberation,—­an insult which I will not endure to have repeated again.  If you say another word in any way suggesting the possibility of improper relations between me and Mr. Finn, either as to deeds or thoughts, as God is above me, I will write to both my father and my brother, and desire them to take me from your house.  If you wish me to remain here, you had better be careful!” As she was making this speech, her temper seemed to rise, and to become hot, and then hotter, till it glowed with a red heat.  She had been cool till the word insult, used by herself, had conveyed back to her a strong impression of her own wrong,—­or perhaps I should rather say a strong feeling of the necessity of becoming indignant.  She was standing as she spoke, and the fire flashed from her eyes, and he quailed before her.  The threat which she had held out to him was very dreadful to him.  He was a man terribly in fear of the world’s good opinion, who lacked the courage to go through a great and harassing trial in order that something better might come afterwards.  His married life had been unhappy.  His wife had not submitted either to his will or to his ways.  He had that great desire to enjoy his full rights, so strong in the minds of weak, ambitious men, and he had told himself that a wife’s obedience was one of those rights which he could not abandon without injury to his self-esteem.  He had thought about the matter, slowly, as was his wont, and had resolved that he would assert himself.  He had asserted himself, and his wife told him to his face that she would go away and leave him.  He could detain her legally, but he could not do even that without the fact of such forcible detention being known to all the world.  How was he to answer her now at this moment, so that she might not write to her father, and so that his self-assertion might still be maintained?

“Passion, Laura, can never be right.”

“Would you have a woman submit to insult without passion?  I at any rate am not such a woman.”  Then there was a pause for a moment.  “If you have nothing else to say to me, you had better leave me.  I am far from well, and my head is throbbing.”