Ned expected a stinging reply to his preliminary challenge, but she did not answer it. Instead, she spoke of an utter triviality.
“What d’you think’s in my mind—to show how little things get hold on you? The first thing that come in it when I saw you so close was pleasure, because I was wearing a pink sunbonnet—that being your favourite colour for me. But Mr. Kellock don’t know what I wear.”
“What in thunder be women made of? You can babble like that and pick flowers, and be a hen devil all the time?”
“If I am a hen devil, then I’m in the proper place for devils, and that’s hell,” she said. “D’you think a woman can’t pick flowers and wear pink and yet be broken to pieces heart and soul?”
“So you ought to be. You was always playing at being a martyr, and now you damned well can be one. And I hope you are. The trouble with you was that I spoiled you and fooled you to the top of your bent, and let you bully-rag me, and never turned round and gave you a bit of the naked truth yourself.”
“I know it,” she said. “You were a great deal too fond of me for my good, Ned, and if you hadn’t loved me so well, I dare say you’d have been a better husband.”
“I couldn’t have been a better husband,” he answered, “and if you’d been made of decent stuff, you’d have known it. Not that I didn’t see the ugly truth about you—I did; but I hoped and hoped that with time you’d get more sense, and so I held my tongue and held on.”
“How I wish you’d told me my faults, Ned.”
“You oughtn’t to want telling. If you’d got any conscience, which you never had, you’d have seen your faults and suffered from ’em, as you ought. For one thing, you were greedy as the grave, and that envious that you didn’t like anybody else to have anything you lacked. If you saw a worm on the ground, you wished you was a bird. ’Twas always so. Everybody else was better off than you, and had got nicer cats and gardens and husbands and everything. A filthy jealousy it was that made you miserable, when you ought to have been happy, and tempted you off to try your luck with this thing, that’s only a machine, not a man. Some chaps would have took you two and smashed your heads together like egg-shells, as you deserved; but I’m above anything like that. You thought I was a fool; but I wasn’t such a fool as to do that. You wrecked me, but I wasn’t going to wreck you.”