He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.
At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been so long festering in her mind—at first unguessed, then vehemently denied, but always there and always becoming more and more poisonous—the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had achieved maturity.
"Now you listen to me," she commanded.
Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.
Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its back and leaned across the back toward her.
So they stood, facing each other.
"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to hope—actually to hope!—for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young, and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one minute your wife."
Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.
"You were a good imitation," he said.
"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife, anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real, so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house, and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"