He looked at her uncomfortably. He did not understand her.
“How the devil do you come to know these things?” he exclaimed. It was not the first time she had opened to him in this strain—not the first by several. And the sharp edge was gone from his astonishment. But she was not the less a riddle to him and a perplexity—a Sphinx, at once alluring and terrifying. “Who told you of them? What makes you think of them?” he repeated.
“Do you never think of them?” she retorted, leaning forward and fixing her eyes on his. “Do you never wonder why all the good things are for a few, and for the rest—a crust? Why the rector dines at the squire’s table and you dine in the steward’s room? Why the parson gives you a finger and thinks he stoops, and his ladies treat you as if you were dirt—only the apothecary? Why you are in one class and they in another till the end of time?”
“D——n them!” he muttered, his face a dull red. She knew how to touch him on the raw.
“Do you never think of those things?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, taking her up sullenly, “if I do?”
She rocked herself back on the settle and looked across at him out of half-closed eyes.
“Then—if you do think,” she answered slowly, “it is to be seen if you are a man.”
“A man?”
“Ay, a man! A man! For if you think of these things, if you stand face to face with them, and do nothing, you are no man! And no lad for me!” lightly. “You are well matched as it is then. Just a match and no more for your white-faced, helpless dumpling of a wife!”