f
any other man. If you were a gentleman, you would not be guilty of the
outrage."

Emily trembled. Here was Jupiter plucked by the beard, and called hard
names to his face, by one of the mere underlings of his dominions!
William Owen not a gentleman! _Judge_ Owen not a gentleman! Could human
presumption go farther? What would be the end of this?

"I will swear as I like, and when I like!" said the Judge, after a pause
of an instant. But he did not swear again immediately, and not at all
again at his sister, during the whole interview, it was noticeable.
Brutality is not best met by brutality; but it is a mistake to suppose
that it is best met by abject submission. What it needs, as its master
and corrective, is _dignified firmness_.

"So this is the way, is it," the Judge went on. "The moment my back is
turned, my house is full of low characters, and quarrelling and fighting
become the order of the day."

"When did all this occur?" asked Aunt Martha, innocently.

"The very evening I left!" thundered the Judge.

"And how have you found it all out, so soon?" queried his sister,
looking him very calmly in the eyes.

It may be a libel, for which an action would lie, to say that Judge Owen
blushed at this home-thrust. He certainly reddened, but that may have
been with anger--not shame.

"How do I know it? What business is that of yours, woman? It is enough
to say that I _do_ know it, and that I will break all that sort of thing
up, or I will break half a dozen heads!" This was a favorite simile of
the Judge's, because it brought in the word "break" twice, in such an
effective manner. "Well, Miss Emily Owen, what have you to say to all
this?" It may be libel, again, to say that the Judge was sheering off
his vessel from a battery that worried him, to engage one that seemed
comparatively helpless; but really the whole thing bore that appearance.

"I, father? I have nothing to say," returned the daughter, "and for that
reason I have not said anything."

"You do not deny, then," thundered the Judge, his voice rising higher
because he had a younger, lower-voiced and less formidable antagonist,
"that on the very night I went away there was low company in this house,
and that--"

Perhaps Emily Owen had never presumed to interrupt her father half a
dozen times during her life, but we have before seen that she _could_ do
so, even wickedly, when fully aroused, and the temptation to do so in
the present instance was over