“It is my business,” I said. “How dared you ask me to take a name you did not mean to do something with?”
This was no gentle answer to turn away wrath, as I very well knew. But there were moments, and this was one of them, when my spirit rebelled against the embargo of submission I had laid upon it. I saw at last that guileful persuasion was useless. I might as well have tried to beguile a wildebeeste from the veldt, or a crocodile from the green slime of the Pungwe River, as this man from the paths of sloth. But there was still the goad left.
“Oh, Alexander the Great! Do you remember what he said to the soldier he found sleeping at his post? ‘Either honour your name, sir, or change it!’”
“Oh! Bah! What do women know of honour. Let me alone, for God’s sake.”
But I would not let him alone. Even when his retorts were coarse and insulting, I persisted. It burned me like an acid to bear the name of this neglecter of his duties: this skulker behind a bush while other men did his work. I made clear to him that any woman with a backbone detests the type of man who potters about the house driving in nails instead of getting out after the big things of life. I gave him no rest under his thorn tree.
I jeered at his wooden boxes, and made mock of the slovenly troopers who passed upon the road below our camp. I jibed at his beloved shrunken white flannels, and let him know I found him no object of beauty in the black bath-slippers. I scarified him, and inflicted many a scar on my own pride in the process; and apparently he remained invulnerable. But sometimes I saw a little colour creep into his sallow cheek, and knew that an arrow had gone home. Until at last one day he turned on me raging:
“Good God! a man had better have married a flaming sword than you! I might as well try to sleep with vitriol trickling over me!”
At that I rejoiced: if an emotion of mingled despair and savage triumph could be described as joy. And thereafter I gave him no quarter. More than ever I bit into him like a steel blade and flickered round him like a flame.
That was the beginning of a new era. And if sometimes the last state of these persons seemed worse than the first—I flamed and flickered on.