"You brute!" she exclaims, flashing him a glance of wrath and scorn. "To begrudge us the pleasant time we have had! I did not know you could be so mean and stingy! Of course I knew that your bachelor uncle in Philadelphia—the one you are named for—would leave you his money when he died. I wish he would die now. He's mortally slow about it. I should think he must be a hundred years old."
"Good God, Ivy! what a heartless and mercenary woman you are!" her husband cries, stormily. "That poor old man, my uncle, who never harmed living soul, how dare you wish for his death? Upon my soul, I am tempted to write to him to leave his money to some orphan asylum or art gallery just to disappoint your hopes."
"You would not dare!" she sobs, hysterically.
"Try me too far, and see what I will not dare," he answers, threateningly, and she stops her sobbing and looks up, fearfully, at the dark, handsome face bent sternly upon her with two smouldering fires in his gloomy black eyes.
It is not as handsome and refined a face as Leslie Noble could boast of two years ago. There are lines of dissipation on it. There is a certain hardness and coarseness upon it, as if engendered by ill-nature and the free indulgence of evil passions. Association with such a woman as Ivy Cleveland would naturally bring that look into a man's face. Coarse, selfish, and unprincipled herself, she has dragged the man's weak, easily-moulded nature down upon a level with her own.
"When I married you, Ivy," pursues Mr. Noble, "I desired to take you to Europe on a bridal tour, but you and your mother, for no earthly reason that I can imagine, declined to go. You refused my offers to take you to my own home in Philadelphia, preferring, as you said, the sunny south for a home. Now you have changed your minds, and declare American life monotonous and unendurable, and fancy you would like to figure in the courts of Europe. You had just as well cry for the moon. You have recklessly dissipated your own property and mine, and must bear the consequences. I cannot afford to take you abroad, and I do not desire to be badgered about it any longer."
"You shall hear about it day and night until I get my wish," Ivy cries, with passionate defiance. "Sell this house and all our fine furniture if you choose. It will bring enough with what you have in bank to afford us a brilliant season in London. Then by the time we return old Noble will have died, perhaps, and left us his fortune."
"Did I not tell you I will not have Uncle Leslie's death counted on so coarsely?" cries Mr. Noble, furiously. "You are a perfect harpy."
"And you are a brute!" Mrs. Noble retorts. "Aren't you ashamed to call your wife such names? and you pretended to be in love with me when you married me, you cruel, unfeeling wretch!"
"You dropped your mask as soon as I made you my wife, and showed me what you really were," Leslie Noble answers, with bitter anger and scorn. "I was only a tool for you, and a stepping-stone to power. Your mother's money was well-nigh exhausted, and you married me so that you could squander mine. Then, too, you have the most horrible temper in the world. Do you think any man could continue to love such a woman?"