wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the right nor to the
left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to the south, but to
remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet, the housewife, the
sole property of her husband, no matter what that husband might be--
vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other things, good or bad.

"Why don't you look glad when you see me come in?" Joel Mazarine
remarked to her suddenly the day before. "If you'd had some husbands,
you might have reason for bein' the statue and the dummy you are. Am I
a drunkard? Am I a thief? Am I a nighthawk? Do I go off lookin' for
other women? Don't I keep the commandments? Ain't you got a home here
as good as any in the land? Didn't I take you out of poverty, and make
you head of all this, with people to wait on you and all the rest of it?"

That was the way he had talked, and somehow she had not seemed able to
bear it; and she had said to him, in unexpected revolt, that her tongue
was her own, and what was in her mind was her own, even if her body
wasn't.

Then, in a fury, he had caught his riding-whip from the wall to lash her
with it, just when Li Choo the Chinaman appeared with a message which he
delivered at the appropriate moment, though he had had it to deliver for
some time. It was to the effect that the Clerk of the Court in the
neighbouring town of Waterway wished to see him at once on urgent
business. The message had been left by a rancher in passing.

As Li Choo delivered the word, he managed to put himself between Mazarine
and his wife in such a way as to enrage the old man, who struck the
Chinaman twice savagely across the shoulders with the whip, and then
stamped out of the house, invoking God to punish the rebellious and the