“We made a mistake in marrying, Lizzie,” he said. “We both found it out long ago. I was not the sort of man you wanted, and perhaps I ought to have remained single. But I have done my duty by you honestly, and—so help me, God—I always shall. What is it you want that I do not try to give you?”
Many and many a woman, when she has been asked that question, the helpless question across the league-sundering gulf, has answered, aloud or dumbly, in a great yearning: “Love, a breath of passion, a touch of tenderness.” But in Lizzie that craving had never been deeper than the bloom on her cheek, and with the bloom it had perished. There are natures too common for the need of love, which is an instinct upwards of the soul. Instead, she answered querulously: “Why don’t you give me some money, and let me live away, somewhere?”
“To do God knows what with yourself? Not I, unless you would like this sort of thing.” He took from among the circulars with which he was daily deluged a chance-sent prospectus of a Home, and put it before her. She glanced at it, and then crumpled it up fiercely, and threw it into the fire.
“If you’re going to do that with me, you’d better look sharp, I can tell you,” she cried, trembling with sudden rage. “How long have you been making that little plan?”
“It is no plan. You could only go in there of your own free will. My only plan is to shelter you here, and make life as happy for you as you will let me.”
Lizzie sniffed contemptuously.
“What did you send for that thing for?”
“It came quite by chance.”
“That’s a damn lie!”
He bent forward, took her wrist, and looked at her sternly between the eyes, which lowered, abashed.