"You can't!" Mrs. Benton fired on him. "I will NOT support your wife!"
"Who asked you to?" Bob demanded. "I'll give you a job, Johnnie! I'll see you don't starve!"
And crack! crack! Martha spoke quietly, scornfully, to Mrs. Benton: "You needn't worry! I have not the least intention of marrying him!"
"You will marry him!" Bob popped. "You'll drop that skunk and marry him, or you'll get out of this house. I'm not going to stand any more nonsense from you!"
A fusillade from the heavy artillery.
"Whose house is this, anyway, Bob Kenworthy? What right have you got to turn anyone out of it? If I was Emily I'd turn YOU out for saying such a thing! I tell you I won't have Martha to support!"
"Don't you worry! I don't feel the need of you for my mother-in-law!" Martha Kenworthy dared to turn directly to her father. "This'll be my house some day, and I'll turn you all out if I want to!"
Emily, still holding that staggering newspaper in her hand, heard these dangerous sentences bursting around her child; they weren't saving her—they were destroying her. A panic took possession of her—and fury. And she rose with almost a jump and seized Martha by the arm. These four sharpshooters saw something that they had never seen before. Anger unused for many years cuts sharp. Emily, with it, mowed them down.
"Keep still!" she cried to Martha. "Don't say another word! I'm ashamed of you! Go up to your room, and don't you come down till you apologize!" But she stood holding her tightly by the arm and glaring about her. Her eyes were fixed on Mrs. Benton. "You stand there saying things as if you could unsay them! A nice example you set these children!" She turned to Bob. "Isn't this MY house?" Bob Kenworthy had never been asked in all his married life before to acknowledge that fact. "And you come here," she went on, furiously, to Cora Benton, "and turn people out of it!"
She stopped, and from sheer amazement no one uttered a word. She glared at them all.