She said: “Ah, now insult me! Insult me before Miss Humfray! That's right! That's right! That's what I'm accustomed to. We all have our cross to bear, as the vicar said last Sunday, and open insult from my husband is mine. I can't complain; I married you with my eyes open.”
Mrs. Chater revealed this secret of her girlhood in a voice which implied that most young women go through the ceremony with their eyes tightly closed, mixed a second brandy-and-soda for her shattered nerves, swallowed it with the air of one draining a poison flask by way of happy release from martyrdom, banged down the glass, and, before her amazed husband could open his lips, hammered in the attack from a third quarter.
“Little you would have cared,” cried she, “if a miracle had not saved my life this afternoon!”
Mr. Chater stood aghast. “My dearest! Saved you! From what?”
His dearest bitterly inquired: “What does it matter to you? You take no interest. If my battered corpse—” Swept to tremendous heights by the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. “If my battered corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this very afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?”
Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair, affirmed that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which he happened to be standing at the moment.
Mrs. Chater trumpeted “Never!”—dropped to her chair, and continued. “You would have been glad.” Her voice shook. “Glad—and in all this wide world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have wept o'er my body.”
Of so melancholy a character was the picture thus presented to her mind, augmenting her previous agitation, that the tumult within her welled damply through her eyes, with noisy distress through her lips.
Patting her distressed back, imploring her to calm, Mr. Chater begged some account of the catastrophe from which she had escaped.
Between convulsive sobs she told him, he bridging the hiatuses of emotion with “Oh-dear-oh-dears,” in which alarm and sympathy were nicely mingled.