rotten people, taking
up with Socialism----Yes, I tell you--Socialism!"

His moment of pathos ended. "NO?" he shouted in an enormous voice.

He became white and grim. He emphasized his next words with a shaken
finger.

"It's got to end, my lady. It's going to end sooner than you expect.
That's all!..."

He paused at the papered door. He had a popular craving for a vivid
curtain and this he felt was just a little too mild.

"It's going to end," he repeated and then with great violence, with
almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and
shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant
enraged, "it's going to end a Damned Sight sooner than you expect."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

SIR ISAAC AS PETRUCHIO

Sec.1

Twice had Sir Isaac come near to betraying the rapid and extensive
preparations for the subjugation of his wife, that he hid behind his
silences. He hoped that their estrangement might be healed by a certain
display of strength and decision. He still refused to let himself
believe that all this trouble that had arisen between them, this sullen
insistence upon unbecoming freedoms of intercourse and movement, this
questioning spirit and a gaucherie of manner that might almost be
mistaken for an aversion from his person, were due to any essential evil
in her nature; he clung almost passionately to the alternative that she
was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of that
interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that veracity
which can only be called immodest, that darken the intellectual skies of
our time, a sweet thing he held her still though touched by corruption,
a prey to "idees," "idees" imparted from the poisoned mind of her
sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns of newspapers, from
all too laxly censored plays, from "blear-eyed" bookshow he thanked the
Archbishop of York for that clever expressive epithet!--from the
careless talk of rashly admitted guests, from the very atmosphere of
London. And it had grown clearer and clearer to him that his duty to
himself and the world and her was to remove her to a purer, simpler air,
beyond the range of these infections, to isolate her and tranquillize
her and so win her back again to that acquiescence, that entirely
hopeless submissiveness that had made her so sweet and dear a companion
for him in the earlier years of their married life. Long before Lady
Beach-Mandarin's cruc