“By God! I should think I would!” cried Thornton, starting to his feet, with blazing eyes and the veins standing out on his forehead.
“It seems, Thornton,” she said very quietly, “you have married the wrong woman.”
Then she rose, too, from the table, moved towards him, and laid her hand on his arm. He shook it off with an impatient oath, and turned away, fuming, to stare out of the window. She was too well accustomed to his fits of passion to resent the indignity. She mechanically picked off some withering leaves from some flowers on the mantelpiece, and waited for him to speak. At last he turned round again, and asked her sullenly:
“Have you any other pretty remarks to make?”
“If you will listen to them quietly.”
“Well, what do you want? I grant I was a fool to marry you. Let me hear the consequences of my folly.”
His face was set in a sneer, an ugly expression. She had seen it several times since that evening at the opera in Paris. The tears sprang into her eyes as she glanced at him.
“Oh, don't speak and look like that!” she cried. “I cannot bear it. I did not intend to say anything hard just now. I only meant that you had mistaken me, and my needs, and my nature. I have tried to look upon marriage from your point of view for four months, and I can't do it any longer. You say I must obey you blindly in everything, even your arbitrary fancies, subordinate myself absolutely to you. Thornton, believe me, where your interests or love are concerned I will do it; but where they are not I can't, and it will be happier for both of us that I should tell you so frankly. If you go your way alone, I must go mine.”
“That means you set yourself in defiance to my wishes?”
Clytie checked an impulse of impatience.