Then the wretched man, who knew no more than she what would become of them
all, and was infinitely the more wretched on that account, broke into a
torrent of oaths. "Haven't I enough to bear?" he asked her. "Haven't I
myself to think about? Is mine such a pleasant prospect, that you come to
pester me, giving me no peace? How do other women manage? Women that have
never had husbands to slave for them as I have slaved for you."

Poor Mrs. Day, the least pugnacious of women, who at the best of times had
scarcely known how to hold her own with him, fled before the unreasonable,
miserable man.

Bessie, in talking to her brother over the hopelessness of their position,
used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama
should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as
this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her
father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be
done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be made to say.

"Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what
are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her
voice with which he had become familiar from her.

"Do? Go without them," he promptly replied.

"You know very well we can't go without clothes, papa."

"Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room.

Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for
long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his