wife is that of indulgent contempt. As there is no equality between
man and woman, so there can be no respect. She is a different being.
He must either look up to her as superior to himself, or down upon
her as inferior. When a man does the former he is more or less in
love, and love to John Ingerfield is an unknown emotion. Her beauty,
her charm, her social tact--even while he makes use of them for his
own purposes, he despises as the weapons of a weak nature.

So in their big, cold mansion John Ingerfield and Anne, his wife, sit
far apart, strangers to one another, neither desiring to know the
other nearer.

About his business he never speaks to her, and she never questions
him. To compensate for the slight shrinkage of time he is able to
devote to it, he becomes more strict and exacting; grows a harsher
master to his people, a sterner creditor, a greedier dealer,
squeezing the uttermost out of every one, feverish to grow richer, so
that he may spend more upon the game that day by day he finds more
tiresome and uninteresting.

And the piled-up casks upon his wharves increase and multiply; and on
the dirty river his ships and barges lie in ever-lengthening lines;
and round his greasy cauldrons sweating, witch-like creatures swarm
in ever-denser numbers, stirring oil and tallow into gold.

Until one summer, from its nest in the far East, there flutters
westward a foul thing. Hovering over Limehouse suburb, seeing it
crowded and unclean, liking its fetid smell, it settles down upon it.

Typhus is the creature's name. At first it lurks there unnoticed,