It was so unusual for Dan to recommend Beth to do anything for her own good that she began to wonder what he wanted; she had observed that he always felt kindly disposed towards people when he was asking a favour of them.
"And, by-the-bye," he pursued, turning his back to the mirror and craning his neck to see the set of his coat-tails, "you might do something for me when you are out. Wilberforce is worrying for his money. It's damned cheek. I sent him a large order for whisky the other day to keep him quiet, but it hasn't answered. I wish you would go and see him—go with a long face, like a good girl, and tell him I'm only waiting till I get my own accounts in. Have a little chat with him, you know, and all that sort of thing—lay yourself out to please him, in fact. He's a gentlemanly fellow for a wine-merchant, and has a weakness for pretty women. If you go, I'll take my dick he'll not trouble us with a bill for the next six months."
"It seems to me," said Beth in her quietest way, "that when a husband asks his wife to make use of her personal appearance or charm of manner to obtain a favour for him from another man, he is requiring something of her which is not at all consistent with her self-respect."
Dan stopped short with his hand up to his moustache to twist it, his bonhomie cast aside in a moment. "Oh, damn your self-respect!" he said brutally. "Your cursed book-talk is enough to drive a man to the devil. Anybody but you, with your 'views' and 'opinions' and fads and fancies generally, would be only too glad to oblige a good husband in such a small matter. And surely to God I know what is consistent with your self-respect! I should be the last person in the world to allow you to compromise it! But your eyes will be opened, and the cursed conceit taken out of you some day, madam, I can tell you! You'll live to regret the way you've treated me, I promise you!"
"My eyes have been pretty well opened as it is," Beth answered. "You left the key in the surgery door last night."
"And you went in there spying on me, did you? That was honourable!" he exclaimed in a voice of scorn.
"I heard the wretched creature you had been vivisecting crying in its agony, and I thought it was a human being, and went to see," Beth answered, speaking in the even, dispassionate way which she had found such an effectual check on Dan's vulgar bluster.
"You killed that dog, then!" he exclaimed, turning on her savagely. "How dare you?"
Beth rose from the writing-table, and went and stretched herself out on the sofa, deliberately facing him.
"How dare you?" she inquired.