all those ridiculous declarations? Children to be brought up Catholics!
Wife not to be influenced! Even to keep an open mind himself to all the
muss and mummery of the Church!

It wasn't over either. That seedy old "saint" was probably my confessor.
Did any rational man want another man to come between him and his
wife--knowing all he did and said, and everything about him?

I was heart-sick as I listened to all this. Apparently the moral of it
was that if I had been allowed to marry without being instructed in the
first conditions of married life my husband had suffered a gross and
shocking injustice.

The disgust I felt was choking me. It was horribly humiliating and
degrading to see my marriage from my husband's point of view, and when I
remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this,
and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I
lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at
everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the table and burst
into tears.

My husband misunderstood this, as he misunderstood everything. Taking my
crying for the last remnant of my resistance he put his arms round my
shoulders again and renewed his fondling.

"Come, don't let us have any more conjugal scenes," he said. "The people
of the hotel will hear us presently, and there will be all sorts of
ridiculous rumours. If your family are rather common people you are a
different pair of shoes altogether."

He was laughing again, kissing my neck (in spite of my shuddering) and
saying:

"You really please me very much, you do indeed, and if they've kept you
in ignorance, what matter? Come now, my sweet little woman, we'll soon
repair that."

I could bear no more. I _must_ speak and I did. Leaping up and facing
round on him I told him my side of the story--how I had been married
against my will, and had not wanted him any more than he had wanted me;
how all my objections had been overruled, all my compunctions borne
down; how everybody had been in a conspiracy to compel me, and I had
been bought and sold like a slave.

"But you can't go any farther than that," I said. "Between you, you have
forced me to marry you, but nobody can force me to obey you, because I
won't."

I saw his face grow paler and paler as I spoke, and when I had finished
it was ashen-white.

"So that's how it is, is it?" he said, and for some minutes more he
tramped about the room, mutte