“I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, and stamped with her bare feet on the sand. “I cannot for my life understand what I ever saw in you that I should have married you. Any one with her senses might have hesitated to tie herself for life to a man with so much evil in his countenance.”
“Yours would be none the worse for washing,” said Morar remorselessly, with an eye on her berry-stained face.
“There’s a gentleman!” she cried. “Oh, my grief, that I should have spoiled my life!”
“You knew what I was when you took me,” said Morar. “Lord knows, I made no pretence at angelic virtues, and ’twas there, by my faith, I was different from yourself!”
“And there’s the coward and liar too!” cried his wife. “You were far too cunning to show me what you really were, and it must have been a woeful ignorance of the world that made me take you on your own estimate.”
“Well, then, the mistake has been on both sides,” said Morar. “There’s no one could be more astonished than myself that my real wife should be so different from what till this hour I had imagined her. Madam, you need not be so noisy; if you scream a little louder the crew will be let into a pretty secret. It is like enough they know you already, for I have been singularly blind.”
He put up what seemed to her for the first time an unlovely hand to stifle a forced yawn: she saw an appalling cruelty in the mouth that had so often kissed her and called her sweet names; his very attitude expressed contempt for her.
“What have I done?” she asked, distracted.
“It is not what you have done,” he said with a coarse deliberation, “’tis what you are and what you cannot help being. The repentance must lie with me. I would give, gaily, ten years of my life to obliterate the past six months.”
“Faith, ’tis a man of grace and character says so to his newly-married wife.”