"At any rate Tatty is not your slave," she went on, and he smiled with her. "I am glad you asked Tatty's pardon. Did she forgive you easily?"
"Too easily. She was aware, she said, that gentlemen would be gentlemen."
"She must have meant precisely the reverse."
"Was I pretty bad?"
She put a hand across her eyes as if to brush the image from them. "What matters the degree? It was another man seated and wearing my lord's body. That hurt."
"By God, Ruth, it shall never happen again!"
She winced as he spoke her name, and her colour rose. "Please make no promise in haste," she said.
"Excuse me; when a man takes an oath for life, the quicker he's through
with it the better—at least that's the way with us Vyells.
It's trifles—like getting drunk, for instance—we do deliberately.
Believe me, child, I have a will of my own."
"Yes," she meditated, "I believe you have a strong will."
"'Tis a swinish business, over-drinking, when all's said and done." He announced it as if he made a discovery; and indeed something of a discovery it was, for that age. "Weakens a man's self-control, besides dulling his palate. . . . They tell me, by the way, that after you left I beat Silk."