"No, never!" exclaimed Mehetabel, with flashing eye.
"You women are like the glassy pools in the Moor. There is a smooth face, and fair flowers floating thereon, and underneath the toad and the effect, the water-rat and festering poison. I shall know how to drive out of you the devil that possesses you this spirit of rebellion and passion for Iver Verstage."
"You may do that," said Mehetabel, recovering her self-mastery, "if you will be kind, forbearing, and gentle."
"It is not with kindness and gentleness that I shall do it," scoffed the Broom-Squire. "The woman that will not bend must be broken. It is not I who will have to yield in this house I, who have been master here these twenty years. I shall know how to bring you to your senses."
He was in foaming fury. He shook his fist, and his short hair bristled.
Mehetabel shrank from him as from a maniac.
"You have no need to threaten," she said, with sadness in her tone. "I am prepared for anything. Life is not so precious to me that I care for it."
"Then why did you crawl out of the marsh?"
She looked at him with wide-open eyes.
"Make an end of my wretchedness if you will. Take a knife, and drive it into my heart. Go to your closet, and bring me that poison you have there, and pour it between my lips. Thrust me, if you will, into the Marsh. It is all one to me. I cannot love you unless you change your manners of thought and act and speech altogether."