Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. I, 1889.djvu/25

 the 'ed an' clean it with your face, that's what I'll do! Understand? Oh, I mean what I say, my lady! Me an' you's a-goin' to spend a evenin' together, there's no two ways about that. Ho ho! he he!"

The frankness of Clem's brutality went far towards redeeming her character. The exquisite satisfaction with which she viewed Jane's present misery, the broad joviality with which she gloated over the prospect of cruelties shortly to be inflicted, put her at once on a par with the noble savage running wild in woods. Civilisation could bring no charge against this young woman; it and she had no common criterion. Who knows but this lust of hers for sanguinary domination was the natural enough issue of the brutalising serfdom of her predecessors in the family line of the Peckovers? A thrall suddenly endowed with authority will assuredly make bitter work for the luckless creature in the next degree of thraldom.

A cloth was already spread across one end of the deal table, with such other