ade to do so, Laura. I need hardly say
to you that I intend to accuse you of no impropriety of feeling in
reference to this young man."

"No, Robert; you need hardly say that. Indeed, to speak my own mind,
I think that you need hardly have alluded to it. I might go further,
and say that such an allusion is in itself an insult,--an insult now
repeated after hours of deliberation,--an insult which I will not
endure to have repeated again. If you say another word in any way
suggesting the possibility of improper relations between me and Mr.
Finn, either as to deeds or thoughts, as God is above me, I will
write to both my father and my brother, and desire them to take me
from your house. If you wish me to remain here, you had better be
careful!" As she was making this speech, her temper seemed to rise,
and to become hot, and then hotter, till it glowed with a red heat.
She had been cool till the word insult, used by herself, had conveyed
back to her a strong impression of her own wrong,--or perhaps I
should rather say a strong feeling of the necessity of becoming
indignant. She was standing as she spoke, and the fire flashed from
her eyes, and he quailed before her. The threat which she had held
out to him was very dreadful to him. He was a man terribly in fear
of the world's good opinion, who lacked the courage to go through a
great and harassing trial in order that something better might come
afterwards. His married life had been unhappy. His wife had not
submitted either to his will or to his ways. He had that great desire
to enjoy his full rights, so strong in the minds of weak, ambitious
men, and he had told himself that a wife's obedience was one of those
rights which he could not abandon without injury to his self-esteem.
He had thought about the matter, slowly, as was his wont, and had
resolved that he would assert himself. He had asserted himself, and
his wife told him to his face that she would go away and leave him.
He could detain her legally, but he could not do even that without
the fact of such forcible detention being known to all the world.
How was he to answer her now at this moment, so that she might not
write to her father, and so that his self-assertion might still be
maintained?

"Passion, Laura, can never be right."

"Would you have a woman submit to insult without passion? I at any
rate am not such a woman." Then there was a pause for a moment. "If
you have nothing else to say to me, you had bett