men, he was humble about himself, and left a great deal to his
womankind; but when he did interfere it was decisive. Even Miss
Gascoigne felt instinctively that she might have wrangled and jangled
for an hour and at the end of it he would have said, almost as gently as
he had said it now, "The children will breakfast with us to-morrow."

Christian, too, was surprised, and something more. She had thought
her husband so exceedingly quiet that sometimes her own high spirit
winced a little at his passiveness; that is, she knew it would have done
had she been her own natural self, and not in the strange, dreamy,
broken-down state, which seemed to take interest in nothing. Still, she
felt some interest in seeing Dr. Grey appear, though but in a trivial
thing, rather different from what she had at first supposed him. And
when, after an interval of awful silence, during which Miss Gascoigne
looked like a brooding hurricane, and Miss Grey frightened out of her
life at what was next to happen, he rose and said, "Now remember,
Aunt Henrietta, you or my wife are to give orders to Phillis that the
children come to us at lunchtime to-day," Christian was conscious of a
slight throb at heart. It was to see in her husband--the man to whom,
whatever he was, she was tied and bound for life--that something
without which no woman can wholly respect any man--the power of
asserting and of maintaining authority; not that arbitrary, domineering
rule which springs from the blind egotism of personal will, and which
every other conscientious will, be it of wife, child, servant, or friend,
instinctively resists, and, ought to resist, but calm, steadfast, just,
righteous authority. There is an old rhyme,

_"A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut-tree,
the more ye thrash 'em, the better they be;"_