"Your ladyship had better have listened to them as knows, you see."
I was too benumbed by that cruel stroke to reply, but Price said enough for both of us.
"If them as knows," she said, "don't get out of this room inside two seconds they'll get their ugly faces slapped."
I thought I had reached the end of my power of endurance, and that night, before going to bed, while my maid was taking down my hair, and I was thinking of Martin and asking myself if I should put up with my husband's brutalities any longer, I heard her say:
"If I were a lady married to the wrong man, I'd have the right one if I had to go through the divorce court for him."
Now that was so exactly the thought that was running riot in my own tormented mind, that I flew at her like a wild cat, asking her how she dared to say anything so abominably wicked, and telling her to take her notice there and then.
But hardly had she left the room, when my heart was in my mouth again, and I was trembling with fear lest she should take me at my word and then the last of my friends would be gone.
Within the next few days the house-party arrived. There would be twenty of them at least, not counting valets and ladies' maids, so that large as Castle Raa was the house was full.
They were about equally divided as to sex and belonged chiefly to my husband's class, but they included Mr. Eastcliff's beautiful wife, Camilla, and Alma's mother, who, much to Alma's chagrin, had insisted upon being invited.
My husband required me to receive them, and I did so, though I was only their nominal hostess, and they knew it and treated me accordingly.
I should be ashamed to speak of the petty slights they put upon me, how they consulted Alma in my presence and otherwise wounded my pride as a woman by showing me that I had lost my own place in my husband's house.
I know there are people of the same class who are kind and considerate, guileless and pure, the true nobility of their country--women who are devoted to their homes and children, and men who spend their wealth and strength for the public good--but my husband's friends were not of that kind.
They were vain and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere, utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant phrase to use) without God.
