“She has weighed them,” Dyke shouted. Then he went on more quietly, but with the incisive hardness that was almost worse than noise. “Besides, she’s over twenty-one; she has independent means—why shouldn’t she do what she likes? She’s her own mistress.”
“Exactly. But we don’t want her to be your mistress,” said the sneering brother. “That’s just what it amounts to.”
From this point onwards the thing was devoid of hope; and they knew it really. Dyke made more and more noise; he rumpled his hair, brandished his arms, broke his shirt front; and the other three felt their helplessness. How could they tackle this hulking ruffian, this savage in dress clothes who disregarded all rules, who cared nothing for civilization? They were three tame men, and utterly impotent against a wild man. He overwhelmed their minds by his unchecked fierceness; but it should be noted that they had not any unworthy physical fear of him, although Eustace, more particularly, felt that at any moment Dyke might strike him. That odd, hideously vulgar expression, A word and a blow, echoed in the troubled thoughts of Eustace. A blow, a struggle, a disgraceful episode, at any moment now.
They appealed to his better feeling, and he seemed to have none. They spoke of law and decency, and he inveighed against the cursed law. A wife that wasn’t a wife, but tied to her irrevocably—a millstone round his neck—“Poor unhappy lady, God forgive me for speaking of her like that. She’s not to blame. No, no, it’s the law’s to blame.”
As he said all this he was banging on the table in front of Mr. Verinder, so forcibly that the porcelain boxes danced and the gold frame fell over.
“It’s fellows like you who make these infernal laws. Why don’t you alter them? Why do you allow people to be tormented and bedevilled because that sort of thing pleased a pack of dirty verminous monks hundreds of years ago? Poor little innocent Emmie too! I feel the cruelty of her situation just as much as you do—and a dashed sight more. It’s monstrous and iniquitous”; and he strode away from the table waving his arms.
In every lull Mr. Verinder said the same sort of thing—that facts were facts, laws laws, proprieties proprieties. “You must see it, Mr. Dyke. On reflection, you must see it. I decline to believe that you yourself will wish to continue—”
Dyke swore that he had no choice; he would continue, he could not stop.
“What do you propose to do then?” asked Mr. Verinder.