"It's a narsty,
dangerous thing," he said, "safest out of the way!" Then he went
on:--"You--are--my--lawful--wife, and what St. Paul says mayhap you
know? 'Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as it is fit in the
Lord.' ... What!--me not know my * * * Testament! Why!--it's the only *
* * book you get a word of when you're nursing for Botany Bay fever. God
curse 'em all! Why--the place was Hell--Hell on earth!"

Aunt M'riar now saw too late that she should not have opened that door,
at any cost. But how about Micky? Surely, however, that was a mere
threat. What had this man to gain by carrying it out? Why had she not
seen that he would never run needless risk, to gain no end?

The worst thorn in her heart was that, changed as he was from the
dissolute, engaging youth that she had dreamed of reforming, she still
knew him for himself. He was, as he said, her husband. And, for all that
she shrank from him and his criminality with horror, she was obliged to
acknowledge--oh, how bitterly!--that she wanted help against herself as
much as against him. She was obliged to acknowledge the grisly force of
Nature, that dictated the reimposition of the yoke that she had through
all these years conceived that she had shaken off. And she knew that she
might look in vain for help to Law, human or theological. For each in
its own way, and for its own purposes, gives countenance to the only
consignment of one human creature to the power of another that the slow
evolution of Justice has left in civilised society. Each says to the
girl trapped into unholy matrimony, from whom the right to look inside
the trap has been cunningly withheld:--"Back to your lord and master! Go
to him, he is your husband--kiss him--take his hand in thine!" Neither
is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one
human being to another, when that human being is a woman. And yet Nature
is so inexorable that the victim of a cruel marriage often needs help
sorely--help against herself, to enable her, on her own behalf, to shake
off the Devil some mysterious instinct impels her to cling to. Such an
instinct was stirring in Aunt M'riar's chaos of thought and feeling,
even through her terror and her consciousness of the vileness of the man
and the vileness of his claim over her. The idea of using the power that
her knowledge of his position gave her never crossed her mind. Say
rather that the fear that a call for help would consign him to a jus