"When you were a child," said my stepmother, white to the lips, "I foresaw what you would grow into."
"You did your best for me," I retorted. "You made my home a paradise—not much worse than this home is to me—you showed me daily how you loved me. I remember well your tender care of me. Truly there are men and women who are baser than beasts."
"If I were a man I would thrash you," she hissed.
"Ask your son Louis, my loving half-brother, to do it for you. Ask that reptile by your side to undertake the task. Cunning and malice have had their day. Let us try brute force."
I laughed in their faces. In this encounter we were more like animals snarling at one another than human beings. Meanwhile Barbara continued her moaning and gibbering upstairs.
"That is my work, is it not?" I went on. "It is I who have made her what she is, a living shame to decency. Before our marriage she never touched strong drink—is that the way it goes? She was an innocent, simple child of nature, and it is I who have debased and contaminated her. That is what you have made my friends believe. If it is any satisfaction to you, hear from my lips that your cowardly plot has succeeded, and that the honorable career I had mapped out for myself is at an end. Has my wife told you that on the first night of our marriage she locked herself in her room in Paris and drank herself into such a filthy state of intoxication that we were turned out of our hotel? But doubtless she kept this delectable piece of information to herself."
"Another of your abominable inventions," cried my stepmother, "as true as all the rest."
"Exactly. As true as all the rest. Women such as she, and you, should be whipped daily for the public good."
"Oh!" cried my stepmother, digging her nails into her palms. If she could have killed me with a look she would have done it—and with shame I admit that I should have deserved a greater punishment than that for expressing myself as I did. But I was stung to utter recklessness, to utter forgetfulness of what was due to one's own sense of self-respect.
"Come, come, John," said Maxwell, trying another tack, "you are over-excited. You will be sorry for this to-morrow."