Then the wretched man, who knew no more than she what would become of them all, and was infinitely the more wretched on that account, broke into a torrent of oaths. "Haven't I enough to bear?" he asked her. "Haven't I myself to think about? Is mine such a pleasant prospect, that you come to pester me, giving me no peace? How do other women manage? Women that have never had husbands to slave for them as I have slaved for you." Poor Mrs. Day, the least pugnacious of women, who at the best of times had scarcely known how to hold her own with him, fled before the unreasonable, miserable man. Bessie, in talking to her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be made to say. "Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her voice with which he had become familiar from her. "Do? Go without them," he promptly replied. "You know very well we can't go without clothes, papa." "Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room. Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his mother to consult his father as to his own future. "There isn't much use that I can see, sir, in my sweating away at my books for this exam," he said. "Oh? Why not?" "Supposing that I get through it, what am I to do then?" "You must do the best you can. This Senior Cambridge Exam, they tell me, is a door to any of the professions." "But you want money to enter a profession, sir. From what I hear we have none." "Your hearing has not played you false in that direction. What I had you managed to spend, among you. I was the goose that laid the golden egg; now circumstances forbid my laying any more--for a time. You must look after yourselves." "But if you could only give us some idea of how to set about it." Then, upon him, too, his father, having shown a greater measure of forbearance so far than he accorded the mere women of his family, turned savagely. The poor wretch did not know how to help them, did not know what to advise them to do: to frighten them was his only resource. "Haven't I got enough to think about?" he shouted at the boy. "You and your mother and sisters come and badger--and badger me--" "All right, sir. I won't badger you any more." "All I ask is to be let alone--to be granted a little peace. You have no mercy--none!"