my wish. In that way I can never know what
I have to trust to. There would be some hope for us if you would admit
this. Am I such an unreasonable, furious brute? Why should you not be
open with me?" Still silence.

"Will you only say that you have been mistaken, and that I may depend
on your not acting secretly in future?" said Lydgate, urgently, but
with something of request in his tone which Rosamond was quick to
perceive. She spoke with coolness.

"I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such words
as you have used towards me. I have not been accustomed to language of
that kind. You have spoken of my 'secret meddling,' and my
'interfering ignorance,' and my 'false assent.' I have never expressed
myself in that way to you, and I think that you ought to apologize.
You spoke of its being impossible to live with me. Certainly you have
not made my life pleasant to me of late. I think it was to be expected
that I should try to avert some of the hardships which our marriage has
brought on me." Another tear fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and she
pressed it away as quietly as the first.

Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated. What place was
there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in? He laid down his
hat, flung an arm over the back of his chair, and looked down for some
moments without speaking. Rosamond had the double purchase over him of
insensibility to the point of justice in his reproach, and of
sensibility to the undeniable hardships now present in her married
life. Although her duplicity in the affair of the house had exceeded
what he knew, and had really hindered the Plymdales from knowing of it,
she had no consciousness that her action could rightly be called false.
We are not obliged to identify our own acts according to a strict
classification, any more than the materials of our grocery and clothes.
Rosamond felt that she was aggrieved, and that this was what Lydgate
had to recognize.

As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which was
inflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers.
He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss of
love for him, and the consequent dreariness of their life. The ready
fulness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly with the
first violent movements of his anger. It would assuredly have been a
vain boast in him to say that he was her master.

"You