'You will stay your month?' he inquired at last, coldly. 'You don't propose, I imagine, to leave me at a moment's notice?' She was bending over her table, and did not look up. 'Oh yes, I will stay my month.' He sat speechless, watching her. She very quickly finished what she was doing, and taking up her note-book, and some half-written letters, she left the room. 'A pretty state of things!' said the Squire, and thrusting his long hands into his pockets he began to pace the library, in the kind of temper that may be imagined--given the man and the circumstances. The difference, however, between this occasion and others lay in the fact that the penalties of temper had grown so unjustly heavy. The Squire felt himself hideously aggrieved. Abominable!--that he should be hindered in his just rights and opinions by this indirect pressure from a woman, whom he couldn't wrestle with and floor, as he would a man, because of her sex. That was always the way with women. No real equality--no give and take--in spite of all the suffrage talk. Their weakness was their tyranny. Weakness indeed! They were much stronger than men. God help England when they got the vote! The Greeks said it--Euripides said it. But, of course, the Greeks have said everything! Hecuba to Agamemnon, for instance, when she is planning the murder of the Thracian King: 'Leave it to me!--and my Trojan women!' And Agamemnon's scoffing reply--poor idiot!--'How can _women_ get the better of men?' And Hecuba's ghastly low-voiced 'In a _crowd_ we are terrible!'--[Greek: deinon to plêthos]--as she and her women turn upon the Thracian, put out his eyes, and tear his children limb from limb. But _one_ woman might be quite enough to upset a quiet man's way of living! The moral pressure of it was so iniquitous! Your convictions or your life! It was the language of a footpad. To pull down the hurdles, and tamely let in Chicksands and his minions--how odious! To part with Elizabeth Bremerton and to be reduced again to the old chaos and helplessness--how still more odious! As to the war--so like a woman to suppose that any war was ever fought with unanimity by any country! Look at the Crimea!--the Boer War!--the Napoleonic Wars themselves, if it came to that! Why was Fox a patriot, and he a traitor? Let her answer that! And all the time, Elizabeth's light touch upon his will was like the curb on a stubborn horse. Once as he passed her table angry curiosity took him to look at some finished work that was lying there. Perfection! Intelligence, accuracy, the clearest of scripts! All his hints taken--and bettered in the taking. Beside it lay some slovenly manuscripts of Levasseur's. He could see the corners of Miss Bremerton's mouth go up as she looked it through. Well, now he was to be left to Levasseur's tender mercies--after all he had taught her! And the accounts, and the estate, and these infernal rations, that no human being could understand!