She was stretching his mind on the rack and disjointing that as well, sitting, leaning against the wall, and working the mechanism.
’Mr. Pennycomequick, I heard about you from your wife before you arrived; how different you proved to the idea I had formed, you have too much conceit to imagine. I found a wooden man, with his limbs affixed to his trunk by pegs, with a wooden face, wooden ideas, wooden manners—and when this wooden figure-head had the audacity to insult me——’
Philip exclaimed, ’What I said was true. You yourself admitted its truth, when you told me your story.’
’My dear dolt!’ said Miss Durham, ’I admit it. But who likes to have the truth skewered on a bayonet, and rammed down his throat? And now—what I say would splutter about like Japanese fireworks and do no one any harm, were it not that it is true, true in every word, and this it is that turns each word into duck-shot, with which I pepper you—through the wall.’
It was a wonder that next day Signora Lombardi did not find the sheets of No. 18 singed, so hot did Philip become between them with offended modesty, with anger, anguish, and shame.
’The game is up, so I do not mind showing you my hand,’ cried Artemisia. She had folded her arms over her breast, and leaned back, with her head against the wall, and talked hastily, passionately. ’That little wife of yours, who is a thousand times too good for you, and whom I pity, yoked to such a fellow as yourself, she told me that it was not possible for you to come to love me, because she was your wife. Not, she hastened to explain, that she esteemed herself irresistible, and very superior, but because she had such a towering opinion of your rectitude, equal to your own of yourself. That was as much as daring me to attempt the conquest; and your own absurd self-esteem was another provocation. When you threw down the glove I accepted the challenge, and you know how in an hour or two I had spun you round like a teetotum.’
She stayed talking to laugh. As she laughed she shook the wall, and the wall rattled Philip’s bed, and the rattling bed rattled his aching joints; but he felt these pains no more in the intensity of the agony of shame that he endured in his racked mind.