"So this is the way, is it," the Judge went on. "The moment my back is turned, my house is full of low characters, and quarrelling and fighting become the order of the day."
"When did all this occur?" asked Aunt Martha, innocently.
"The very evening I left!" thundered the Judge.
"And how have you found it all out, so soon?" queried his sister, looking him very calmly in the eyes.
It may be a libel, for which an action would lie, to say that Judge Owen blushed at this home-thrust. He certainly reddened, but that may have been with anger—not shame.
"How do I know it? What business is that of yours, woman? It is enough to say that I do know it, and that I will break all that sort of thing up, or I will break half a dozen heads!" This was a favorite simile of the Judge's, because it brought in the word "break" twice, in such an effective manner. "Well, Miss Emily Owen, what have you to say to all this?" It may be libel, again, to say that the Judge was sheering off his vessel from a battery that worried him, to engage one that seemed comparatively helpless; but really the whole thing bore that appearance.
"I, father? I have nothing to say," returned the daughter, "and for that reason I have not said anything."
"You do not deny, then," thundered the Judge, his voice rising higher because he had a younger, lower-voiced and less formidable antagonist, "that on the very night I went away there was low company in this house, and that—"
Perhaps Emily Owen had never presumed to interrupt her father half a dozen times during her life, but we have before seen that she could do so, even wickedly, when fully aroused, and the temptation to do so in the present instance was overpowering. Besides, she had just caught a lesson from her aunt, in the "womanly art of self-defence," the muscular development for which lies in the tongue.
"Do you call Colonel Bancker low company, father?"