"I've enough on my hands in that house already, what with Betsy unmarried, and your father doing nothing for her, and that nasty Nessy MacLeod making up to him. You ungrateful minx! You are ruining everything! After all I've done for you too! But no matter! If you will make your bed I shall take care that you lie on it."
With that, and the peak of her half-moon bonnet almost dancing over her angry face, Aunt Bridget flounced out of my room.
Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me. He looked down at me with an indulgent and significant smile, which brought the colour rushing back to my face, put me to sit by his side, touched my arm with one of his large white clammy hands, stroked his long brown beard with the other, and then in the half-reproving tone which a Sunday-school teacher might have used to a wayward child, he began to tell me what the consequences would be if I persisted in my present conduct.
They would be serious. The law was very clear on marital rights. If a wife refused to live with her husband, except on a plea of cruelty or something equally plausible, he could apply to the court and compel her to do so; and if she declined, if she removed herself from his abode, or having removed, refused to return, the Court might punish her—it might even imprison her.
"So you see, the man is the top dog in a case like this, my dear, and he can compel the woman to obey him."
"Do you mean," I said, "that he can use force to compel her?"
"Reasonable force, yes. I think that's so. And quite right, too, when you come to think of it. The woman has entered into a serious contract, and it is the duty of the law to see that she fulfills the conditions of it."
I remembered how little I had known of the conditions of the contract I had entered into, but I was too heart-sick and ashamed to say anything about that.
"Aw yes, that's so," said the advocate, "force, reasonable force! You may say it puts a woman in a worse position as a wife than she would be if she were a mistress. That's true, but it's the law, and once a woman has married a man, the only escape from this condition of submission is imprisonment."
"Then I would rather that—a thousand times rather," I said, for I was hot with anger and indignation.