Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/83

Rh odd "step" than the weird design of just giving them a lead? They were to leave her alone, by her sharp prescription, and she would show them, once for all, how to do it. Cutting her dead wasn't leaving her alone,—any idiot could do that; conversing with her affably was the privilege she offered, and the one he had so effectually embraced—he made a clean breast of this—that he had breathed to her no syllable of the message left with him by her aunt.

"Then you mean," this lady now inquired, "that I'm to go and call upon her, at that impossible place, just as if she were the pink of propriety, and we had no exception whatever to take to her conduct? Then you mean," Mrs Traffle had pursued, with a gleam in her eye of more dangerous portent than any he had ever known himself to kindle there,—"then you mean that I'm to grovel before a chit of a creature on whom I've lavished every benefit, and to whom I've actually offered every indulgence, and who shows herself, in return for it all, by what I make out from your rigmarole, a fiend of insolence as well as of vice?"

The danger described by Sidney Traffle was not that of any further act of violence from Jane than this freedom of address to him, unprecedented in their long intercourse,—this sustained and, as he had in a degree to allow, not unfounded note of sarcasm; such a resort to which, on his wife's part, would, at the best, mark the prospect for him, in a form