"Oh, I warrant you they will always respect me," he growled, "the hand that holds the purse-strings commands respect."
"So you think now, Egidio," returned Ragna, for once speaking out her mind--generally she schooled herself to submission, "but I tell you the time will come when all the disrespect you inspire them with towards their mother will be turned against yourself. You think you can hold them by your power over them, by your authority, I tell you that you are building on sand. Love begets love, coldness begets coldness and hatred begets hatred!"
Valentini's face grew red, the veins swelled in his forehead, his eyes glared from under the beetling brows.
"You talk of love and respect, you!" he roared, and she recoiled involuntarily from his violence. "How dare you speak to me like that? Remember that I picked you out of the gutter--where would you be now if it were not for me? If I ever married you at all, it was because my head was still so weak from the fever that I knew no better than to let myself be roped in. And here I find myself, saddled with a bad tempered, puling wife and a family that is only half mine, where other young men of my age--"
"Egidio!" she cried with flashing eyes, "recollect please, that I only married you because you wore down my resistances, because you begged and implored--"
"Silence, you lie! How dare you interrupt me?"
"True!" his hands appealed to Heaven. "It is as false as Hell, like yourself! How much do you suppose I believed of that cock-and-bull story you told me, about your being the light-of-love of a prince? A prince!--a gondolier perhaps, or a _facchino di piazza_!"
"Hush," she said, as pale as death, "the servants will overhear you."
"The servants! What do I care for the servants? Let them hear, I have nothing to conceal from them!"
The taunt was like a blow in the face; Ragna stiffened under it and turned cold.
"You forget, Signor Valentini, that in insulting me, you insult yourself, for when all is said and done, I am the wife you have chosen. Policy at least should dictate another course of conduct towards me,--everything that lowers me in the eyes of the world lowers you, too."
His answer was to seize a large Contagalli vase, standing on a console between the windows and smash it on the tiled floor, then he turned and rushed from the room. Ragna stood looking after him a scornful smile creeping over her frozen face. In that moment she had seen revealed the innermost hideous recesses of the man's soul, the man who was her husband, the father of Beppino. In the silence there rose to her ears the reverberating bang of the _portone_, and the angry beat of his footsteps on the stone pavement outside.