“Oh, Hartley,” exclaimed Irene, as he paused; “don’t talk to me in this way!  Don’t look at me so!  It will kill me.  I have done wrong.  I have acted like foolish child.  But I am penitent.  It was half in sport that I went away, and I was so sure of seeing you at Ivy Cliff yesterday that I told father you were coming.”

“Irene, sit down.”  And Emerson took the hand of his wife and led her to a sofa.  Then, after closing the parlor door, he drew a chair and seated himself directly in front of her.  There was a coldness and self-possession about him, that chilled Irene.

“It is a serious thing,” he said, looking steadily in her face, “for a wife to leave, in anger, her husband’s house for that of her father.”

She tried to make some reply and moved her lips in attempted utterance, but the organs of speech refused to perform their office.

“You left me once before in anger, and I went after you.  But it was clearly understood with myself then that if you repeated the act it would be final in all that appertained to me; that unless you returned, it would be a lifelong separation.  You have repeated the act; and, knowing your pride and tenacity of will, I did not anticipate your return.  And so I was looking the sad, stern future in the face as steadily as possible, and preparing to meet it as a man conscious of right should be prepared to meet whatever trouble lies in store for him.  I went out this evening, after passing the Christmas day alone, with the purpose of consulting an old and discreet friend as to the wisest course of action.  But the thing was too painful to speak of yet.  So I came back—­and you are here!”

She looked at him steadily while he spoke, her face white as marble, and her colorless lips drawn back from her teeth.

“Irene,” he continued, “it is folly for us to keep on in the way we have been going.  I am wearied out, and you cannot be happy in a relation that is for ever reminding you that your own will and thought are no longer sole arbiters of action; that there is another will and another thought that must at times be consulted, and even obeyed.  I am a man, and a husband; you a woman, and a wife,—­we are equal as to rights and duties—­equal in the eyes of God; but to the man and husband appertains a certain precedence in action; consent, co-operation and approval, if he be a thoughtful and judicious man, appertaining to the wife.”

As Emerson spoke thus, he noticed a sign of returning warmth in her pale face, and a dim, distant flash in her eyes.  Her proud spirit did not accept this view of their relation to each other.  He went on: 

“If a wife has no confidence in her husband’s manly judgment, if she cannot even respect him, then the case is altered.  She must be understanding and will to herself; must lead both him and herself if he be weak enough to consent.  But the relation is not a true one; and marriage, under this condition of things, is only a semblance.”