d Sir Percival. "It's a worse crisis than you think
for, I can tell you."

"So I should suppose, from your behaviour for the last day or two,"
returned the other coolly. "But wait a little. Before we advance to
what I do NOT know, let us be quite certain of what I DO know. Let us
first see if I am right about the time that is past, before I make any
proposal to you for the time that is to come."

"Stop till I get the brandy and water. Have some yourself."

"Thank you, Percival. The cold water with pleasure, a spoon, and the
basin of sugar. Eau sucree, my friend--nothing more."

"Sugar-and-water for a man of your age!--There! mix your sickly mess.
You foreigners are all alike."

"Now listen, Percival. I will put our position plainly before you, as
I understand it, and you shall say if I am right or wrong. You and I
both came back to this house from the Continent with our affairs very
seriously embarrassed--"

"Cut it short! I wanted some thousands and you some hundreds, and
without the money we were both in a fair way to go to the dogs
together. There's the situation. Make what you can of it. Go on."

"Well, Percival, in your own solid English words, you wanted some
thousands and I wanted some hundreds, and the only way of getting them
was for you to raise the money for your own necessity (with a small
margin beyond for my poor little hundreds) by the help of your wife.
What did I tell you about your wife on our way to England?--and what
did I tell you again when we had come here, and when I had seen for
myself the sort of woman Miss Halcombe was?"

"How should I know? You talked nineteen to the dozen, I suppose, just
as usual."

"I said this: Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto only discovered
two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her
down--a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the
people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above
them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but in the end
not less certain) is never to accept a provocation at a woman's hands.
It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women,
who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one
quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in. If they
can once shake this superior quality in their master, they get the
better of HIM. If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the
better of THEM.