"Yes, and you killed her too," cried Edith, for the first time since her marriage losing control of her temper and answering back. "Everybody says you worried her into the grave. But you won't succeed so well with me. I will live just to defy you, if no more. And I'll show you that I'll not bear everything, too."
It was all over in a moment, and it was not repeated. Indeed, Edith was kinder and gentler and more submissive in her manner after that for days, as sweet natures always are when they have once broken over the rules which govern their lives.
Yet the old man always spoke of Edith as a virago after that.
"She's worse'n 'Liz'beth," he said, "and she had a temper of her own at times that would just singe things."
Ben passed most of his evenings and a good part of his days at the village "store." He came home the worse for drink occasionally, and he was absolutely indifferent to all the work and care of the farm and family.
"She's just like 'Liz'beth," the old man said to his neighbors; "she don't make home entertainin' for her husband. But Ben isn't balanced like me, and he goes wrong. He's excitable. I never was. The right kind of a woman could keep him at home."
After a child came to them matters seemed to mend for a time. So long as the infant lay pink and helpless in its mother's arms or in its crib, it was a bond to unite them all.
So soon as it began to be an active child, with naughty ways which needed correction, it was another element of discord.
The old man did not think Edith capable of controlling the child, and Ben was hasty and harsh, and he did not like to hear the baby cry. So he stayed more and more at the store, and was an object of fear to the child and of reproach to the mother when he did return.
They drifted farther apart, and the old man constantly widened the breach between them. They had been married six years, and the baby girl was four years old, when Ben struck Edith a blow, one day, and told her to take her child and leave the house.