He himself, at times, suspected that they did, and cursed himself because he could not keep cool.  It was part of his horrors that he knew his internal furies were worse than folly, and yet he could not restrain them.  The creeping suspicion that this was only the result of the simple fact that he had never tried to restrain any tendency of his own was maddening.  His nervous system was a wreck.  He drank a great deal of whisky to keep himself “straight” during the day, and he rose many times during his black waking hours in the night to drink more because he obstinately refused to give up the hope that, if he drank enough, it would make him sleep.  As through the thoughts of Mount Dunstan, who was a clean and healthy human being, there ran one thread which would not disentangle itself, so there ran through his unwholesome thinking a thread which burned like fire.  His secret ravings would not have been good to hear.  His passion was more than half hatred, and a desire for vengeance, for the chance to re-assert his own power, to prove himself master, to get the better in one way or another of this arrogant young outsider and her high-handed pride.  The condition of his mind was so far from normal that he failed to see that the things he said to himself, the plans he laid, were grotesque in their folly.  The old cruel dominance of the man over the woman thing, which had seemed the mere natural working of the law among men of his race in centuries past, was awake in him, amid the limitations of modern days.

“My God,” he said to himself more than once, “I would like to have had her in my hands a few hundred years ago.  Women were kept in their places, then.”

He was even frenzied enough to think over what he would have done, if such a thing had been—­of her utter helplessness against that which raged in him—­of the grey thickness of the walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon her—­insult, torment, death.  His alcohol-excited brain ran riot—­but, when it did its foolish worst, he was baffled by one thing.

“Damn her!” he found himself crying out.  “If I had hung her up and cut her into strips she would have died staring at me with her big eyes—­without uttering a sound.”

There was a long reach between his imaginings and the time he lived in.  America had not been discovered in those decent days, and now a man could not beat even his own wife, or spend her money, without being meddled with by fools.  He was thinking of a New York young woman of the nineteenth century who could actually do as she hanged pleased, and who pleased to be damned high and mighty.  For that reason in itself it was incumbent upon a man to get even with her in one way or another.  High and mightiness was not the hardest thing to reach.  It offered a good aim.

His temper when he returned to Stornham was of the order which in past years had set Rosalie and her child shuddering and had sent the servants about the house with pale or sullen faces.  Betty’s presence had the odd effect of restraining him, and he even told her so with sneering resentment.