rooms will be
taken, and our furniture transferred to them.'

'To me that will make no difference,' returned his wife, in the same
voice as before. 'I have decided--as you told me to--to go with Willie
to mother's next Tuesday. You, of course, must do as you please. I
should have thought a summer at the seaside would have been more helpful
to you; but if you prefer to live in Islington--'

Reardon approached her, and laid a hand on her shoulder.

'Amy, are you my wife, or not?'

'I am certainly not the wife of a clerk who is paid so much a week.'

He had foreseen a struggle, but without certainty of the form Amy's
opposition would take. For himself he meant to be gently resolute,
calmly regardless of protest. But in a man to whom such self-assertion
is a matter of conscious effort, tremor of the nerves will always
interfere with the line of conduct he has conceived in advance.
Already Reardon had spoken with far more bluntness than he proposed;
involuntarily, his voice slipped from earnest determination to the
note of absolutism, and, as is wont to be the case, the sound of these
strange tones instigated him to further utterances of the same kind.
He lost control of himself. Amy's last reply went through him like an
electric shock, and for the moment he was a mere husband defied by
his wife, the male stung to exertion of his brute force against the
physically weaker sex.

'However you regard me, you will do what I think fit. I shall not argue
with you. If I choose to take lodgings in Whitechapel, there you will
come and live.'

He met Amy's full look, and was conscious of that in it which
corresponded to his own brutality. She had become suddenly a much
older woman; her cheeks were tight drawn into thinness, her lips were
bloodlessly hard, there was an unknown furrow along her forehead, and
she glared like the animal that defends itself with tooth and claw.

'Do as YOU think fit? Indeed!'

Could Amy's voice sound like that? Great Heaven! With just such accent
he had heard a wrangling woman retort upon her husband at the street
corner. Is there then no essential difference between a woman of this
world and one of that? Does the same nature lie beneath such unlike
surfaces?

He had but to do one thing: to seize her by the arm, drag her up
from the chair, dash her back again with all his force--there, the
transformation would be complete, they would stand towards each other
on the natural footing. With an adde