“Oh!” exclaimed Patience, springing to her feet, “don’t let us have a scene for Hal’s benefit. Do cultivate a little good taste, if good sense is too far beyond you.”
Her words were not soothing, and Beverly exploded in one of his most violent passions. He tore up and down the room, banging his fist alternately on the table, the mantel, and the books, and once he hit the panel of a door so heavy a blow that it sprang. Patience sat down and turned her back. Hal endeavoured to stop him; but he had found a listener, and would discharge his mind of its accumulated virus. He told the tale of the winter in spasmodic gusts, hung and fringed with oaths. Finally he flung himself out of the room, shouting all the way across the hall.
For a moment there was an intense and meaning silence between the two women; then Hal stood up and laid her palms to her head.
“Patience!” she said, “Patience! this is awful. What have I done? Oh, does it really mean anything? I have seen Bev go into tempers all my life—but—Tell me, please—does this really mean anything—”
“Whether it does or does not it need not worry you beyond warning you against mistakes on your own account. I married with my eyes open, and I can take care of myself. Don’t marry your rich man unless you like him well enough to pretend to like him a good deal more. If you do, you’ll end by loathing him and yourself—and what is more, he’ll know it.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think I am as intense as you are—but what do you suppose makes Beverly such a wild animal? We are none of us like that, and never have been, as far as I know, although some of the old boys were pretty gay, not to say lawless. But for two or three generations we seem to have been a fairly well-conducted lot. Beverly is almost a freak.”
Patience crossed the room, and lifting down a volume of Darwin’s “Descent of Man” read from the chapter on Civilised Nations:—
“‘With mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally, without any assignable cause, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by very many generations.’”
VII
Two weeks later Patience received a letter from Hal which induced no surprise.