Be this as it may, Mr. Brady a few days later was not greatly surprised when on offering to transfer his business to a more scrupulous firm of solicitors than those to whom he had previously entrusted the conduct of his difficulties, the proposal was courteously but firmly declined.
“I shall live it down,” thought Mr. Brady as he strode out of the office, his hat crushed a little over his brows.
He had said the same thing before, and he had done it; but after all, each year in a man’s age, each upward step he has climbed, render that “living down” a more difficult business to perform.
It is impossible to go on having a leg broken and reset without becoming slightly a cripple, and it is more impossible still that a character shall go through a blackening process time after time and come out white in the end.
Mr. Brady had set himself a harder task than he imagined when he talked of living down the effects of his latest error, and if he did not know this Nettie did; Nettie who, hearing all that was going on, having read those ballads which found swift sale at the somewhat high price of one halfpenny each, having seen the “dour” looks cast on her husband in the barn-like meeting-house, ventured to ask him if he did not think it would be better to sell all they possessed and remove to another part of the country.
Whereupon, he turned with passionate fury, with the mad anger of a brutal nature, addressing the only person who was completely hopelessly in his power, and reproached her with having been the curse of his life, the ruin of his prospects, the sole cause of every misfortune that had befallen him.
“I wish to God I had never set eyes on you,” he said. “If I must be such a fool as to marry, I ought to have married some one who would have been a help instead of a burden, a woman capable of doing something besides bringing a tribe of fretful, delicate children into the world.”
“You ought to have married a woman, Daniel Brady,” answered Nettie calmly, “who the first blow you gave her would have had you up before the magistrate and punished for it.”
“None of your insolence or it will be worse for you,” he interrupted.
“Who,” continued Nettie, shrinking a little with a physical terror which had become habitual, “would have insisted on having things suitable for herself and her children, and who, if you had not provided them would have left you.”