"Oh, don't stand there saying nothing." Her voice was shrill. "Of course, you think I ought to wait on myself—now. And I suppose because I've been in prison you expect me to be thankful to be here—even in a hole like this. Well, I'm not. I hate the place. It's common and shabby and horrid, and I'm not going to live all anyhow, to please you."
Herrick, dismayed at the vehemence of her manner, could find no words; and she went on with increasing passion:
"I'm your wife—if I am a jail-bird!" She flung the taunt at him, and her whole little figure was shaken with the intensity of her emotion. "If you think I'm going to pretend to be penitent—and grateful to you—you are wrong! I hate you, Jim, I loathe and despise you—you might have taken the blame on your shoulders—and instead you stood by and watched them torture me. You've not been to prison, you've not been bullied and despised—you've not spent weeks and months in a loathsome little cell where the sun never shone and there was never a breath of air—you've not been called by a number, and preached at by the chaplain—oh, no, you've been living here in the sunshine—enjoying yourself, eating good food—your chicken and your savouries—and for all I know passing as a single man, and keeping your disgraced wife in the background!"
She struck the table sharply with her hand, and her cup and saucer fell to the ground and smashed, the tea trickling in a brown stream over the dim blues and greens of the Persian carpet.
She ignored the catastrophe.
"Well, you've got me back now, and I'm going to make your life what mine has been for the last year and a half! I've longed for this moment, Jim"—she set her teeth—"longed for it during the horrible days and the still more horrible nights. It was only my hatred of you that kept me alive in the first ghastly weeks. I could have died—I was very ill at first, and they thought I'd die—but I knew I wouldn't. I meant to live so that I could tell you again to your face that I hate you, hate you—hate you! And I'm going to show you what hate is, Jim—I'm going to make you wish you were dead—or in prison, as I have been. Oh, my God—I wish—I wish I were dead!"
With a sudden collapse of all her powers she dropped, face downwards, on the big divan, and burst into a fit of wild and uncontrollable sobbing.
With an effort whose magnitude he himself only half realized, Herrick went softly over to the weeping, writhing figure, and laid his hand very gently on her shoulder.
"Eva, for pity's sake——"
She flung off his hand as though it had been a venomous serpent which had touched her; and again her wild sobbing filled the room.