to ask. I have said
nothing about misbehaviour, and you ought, at any rate, to wait till I
have done so. I should be very sorry to use such a word, and do not
think that I shall ever have occasion. But surely you will admit that
there may be practices, and manners, and customs on which I am at
liberty to speak to you. I am older than you."

"Husbands, of course, are older than their wives, but wives generally
know what they are about quite as well as their husbands."

"Mary, that isn't the proper way to take what I say. You have a very
peculiar place to fill in the world,--a place for which your early life
could not give you the very fittest training."

"Then why did you put me there?"

"Because of my love, and also because I had no doubt whatever as to
your becoming fit. There is a levity which is often pretty and becoming
in a girl, in which a married woman in some ranks of life may, perhaps,
innocently indulge, but which is not appropriate to higher positions."

"This is all because I laughed when Captain De Baron mispronounced the
men's names. I don't know anything peculiar in my position. One would
suppose that I was going to be made a sort of female bishop, or to sit
all my life as a chairwoman, like that Miss Mildmay. Of course I laugh
when things are said that make me laugh. And as for Captain De Baron, I
think he is very nice. Papa likes him, and he is always at the
Houghtons, and I cannot agree that he was loud and vulgar, or
boisterous, because he made a few innocent jokes in Kensington
Gardens."

He perceived now, for the first time since he had known her, that she
had a temper of her own, which he might find some difficulty in
controlling. She had endured gently enough his first allusions to
herself, but had risen up in wrath against him from the moment in which
he had spoken disparagingly of her father. At the moment he had nothing
further to say. He had used what eloquence there was in him, what words
he had collected together, and then walked home in silence. But his
mind was full of the matter; and though he made no further allusion on
that day, or for some subsequent days either to this conversation or to
his wife's conduct in the park, he had it always in his mind. He must
be the master, and in order that he might be master the Dean must be as
little as possible in the house. And that intimacy with Jack De Baron
must be crushed,--if only that she might be taught that he intended to
be master.