"Oh, Aunt, I cannot endure to have Papa scold, when he is in one of his terrible humors," said the frightened girl. "I have done nothing, that I know of; but you don't know what rough words he says to me sometimes, and I have been almost afraid that he would strike me with that heavy hand! I believe I should die if he did."
"No, child, you would not die, I think," said the more practical Aunt, "but something might occur for which your father would one day be quite as sorry—your last particle of love and respect for him might die, and that would be sadder than the death of many bodies. But come, Emily; we shall be called again in a moment."
Aunt and niece descended the stairs to the parlor, the latter trembling like a leaf in the wind and the former in a strange flutter that was part trepidation and part indignation. They found affairs in the parlor in a very promising condition, as the aunt had suspected. Judge Owen was too angry to sit in his large chair, as he would have liked to do, and receive the culprits with judicial dignity. He was walking the floor, with his hands behind his back and every indication of very stormy weather on his countenance. He looked bigger and more burly than ever, and less than ever like what the brother and father should have been, to the two who entered. Mrs. Owen sat in a rocking-chair, swaying backward and forward, with her hand to her eyes and very much the appearance of a whipped child who had been set down in that chair with orders to be "good." It was not supposable that the Judge had been whipping her, physically; but he had unquestionably been "getting his hand in" for the exercise that was to come, by reading her a severe lecture upon everything that she had done and everything she had not done, since the day they were married.
"So then!" he broke out, the moment the culprits appeared in view. "This is the kind of order you keep in my house—my house!" and he emphasized the possessive pronoun so severely that the poor little word must have had a hard time of it among his strong front teeth.
Emily, as yet, replied nothing. But Aunt Martha said:
"Well really, brother, I do not see that the house is in very bad order! Perhaps that rocker is a little out of place, and the etagere—"
"D—n it, woman, I am not talking of the furniture, and you know it!" thundered the Judge.
"William Owen!" said Aunt Martha, who had not gone through fifty or a hundred such conflicts without deriving some controversial profit from them—"I do not choose to be sworn at, in your house or the house of any other man. If you were a gentleman, you would not be guilty of the outrage."
Emily trembled. Here was Jupiter plucked by the beard, and called hard names to his face, by one of the mere underlings of his dominions! William Owen not a gentleman! Judge Owen not a gentleman! Could human presumption go farther? What would be the end of this?
"I will swear as I like, and when I like!" said the Judge, after a pause of an instant. But he did not swear again immediately, and not at all again at his sister, during the whole interview, it was noticeable. Brutality is not best met by brutality; but it is a mistake to suppose that it is best met by abject submission. What it needs, as its master and corrective, is dignified firmness.