bing him by the foot. "Come here till I tell
you about the crabs."

I remember that I got up and went out of the low window on to the porch,
looking down at the quiet dun shadows and the slope of yellowed grass
leading to the river, while Jacky and the boy kept up a hurly-burly
conversation about soldier-crabs that tore each other's legs off, and
purple and pink sea-roses that ate raw meat, and sea-spiders like specks
of blood in the rocks. My husband laughed once or twice, helping Jacky
out with her natural history. I think it was the sound of that cheery,
mellow laugh of his that fermented every bitter drop in my heart, and
brought clearly before me for the first time the idea of the course
which I afterwards followed. I thrust it back then, as if it had been a
sneer of the Devil's at all I held good and pure. What was there in the
world good and pure for me but the man sitting yonder, and the thought
that I was his wife? And yet----I had an unquiet brain, of moderate
power, perhaps, but which had been forced and harried and dragged into
exertion every moment of my life, according to the custom with women in
the States from which I came. Every meanest hint of a talent in me had
been nursed, every taste purged, by the rules of my father's clique of
friends. The chance of this was all over,--had been escaping since my
marriage-day. Now I clearly saw the life opening before me. What would
taste or talent be worth in the coarse struggle we were about to begin
for bread and butter? "Surely, we have lost something beyond money," I
thought, looking behind into the room, where my husband was quietly
going back to the Arndts in quest of food for reflection, and Jacky
prosed on about sea-anemones. I caught a glimpse of my sallow face in
the mirror: it was full of a fierce disgust. Was their indifference to
this loss a mere torpid ignorance of the actual brain- and soul-wants it
would bring on us, or did they really look at life and accept its hard
circumstances from some strange standing-ground of which I knew nothing?
I had not become acclimated to the atmosphere of my husband's family in
the year and a half that I had been his wife. He had been married
before; there were five children, beginning at Robert, the young
preacher at Newport, and ending with Teddy, beating the drum with his
fists yonder on the table; all of them, like their father, Western-born,
with big, square-built frames, and grave, downright-looking faces;
sim