"That will be nothing new," she replied tremulously. "I am used to hard work."
He laughed out. She looked like a creature whom the weariness of toil had never touched. He was so convinced of her idleness and frivolity that he could see nothing else.
"Work? You look like it. Your mother looks like it too. She fluttered into her Dover Street Club, clad like Solomon in all his glory, and with no more concern about the cost of her finery than the lilies of the field. The only work that women like you understand is how to spend money. That's your vocation, the business of your life! How to catch some man and wring from him the means to indulge your desires."
He was mounted on his hobby now, and his words came with a sudden fluency for which his previous taciturnity made her unprepared. "She was quite young—young enough to have been unworldly, you would have thought—when she jilted a poor man to marry a rich one. In spite of that innocent exterior, she was as clever as a pickpocket, as cautious as a Jew. Afterwards I remembered how carefully she had questioned me as to the likelihood of my coming into this property. There was a life between me and it. She was not taking any chances!... But, after all, the life failed. I came into my inheritance not so many years after my jilting ... and, by the Lord! when she was a needy widow and I was a rich man, she would have married me, had I so much as held up a finger. Do you deny it?"
Virginia could hardly breathe. If the hands she had clutched when drowning had contracted about her throat and held her down under water, she might have felt something the same consternation. Love! Love at first sight! Why, the man loathed her.
"But," she brought out breathlessly, "if this—if this is what you think of me, why—why have you married me?"
"I'll tell you why. I married because I am siren-proof, and I am going to reform you. You're young; you may not be irreclaimable. We'll see if I can change your nature; but if I can't do that, I swear I will control your actions. For the first time in your life, you are going to be disciplined. The starting-point for your training is that you should be completely cut off from your past. Therefore, you will not again see any of the members of your family, either here, or elsewhere. You need not look so incredulous. I carry out the things I undertake. Don't suppose you can escape from me."
The hatred in his voice was the outcome of twenty years of morbid egotism. The very atrocity of his amazing tirade helped his wife to rally. All her dignity, all her good breeding, came now to her support.
She spoke low but steadily. "It is true that I cannot escape. I bound myself this morning, by vows which to me are more binding than cords. But let me remind you that you also took vows—to love and to cherish."
He bowed ironically. "Oh, be sure that I shall cherish my piece of perfection," he replied, "and, when I have broken her to harness, I may reward her with my affection."