"False witnesses--false testimony. When you come to consider the matter it may not suit your purpose to appeal to the law. Establish that my wife lives in fear of me, and that I am systematically cruel to her, and you will succeed in obtaining a judicial separation. I shall not thwart you, for it is what I pray for. The Courts award her maintenance, the income of a third of what I am worth. Then I am free, and you and she can trouble me no more. Free! Can you understand what that means to me? Fools! I have offered her more than a third, and she has refused. Why, if I gave her cause for a complete divorce she would not avail herself of it. She is too good a wife, too pure, too mindful of her wifely duties to desert the husband she loves so well." Had it not been that I was apprehensive of falling into deeper public disgrace I should not have spoken so openly, for it was speaking against my own interests; but, indeed, I might have spared myself this small duplicity, for nothing was farther from their wishes than to sever the bonds which bound me to Barbara. While those held firm they had, through her, some power over my purse; loosen them, and the power was gone. It was only through my enforced bondage that they could hope to gain. "When you were a child," said my stepmother, white to the lips, "I foresaw what you would grow into." "You did your best for me," I retorted. "You made my home a paradise--not much worse than this home is to me--you showed me daily how you loved me. I remember well your tender care of me. Truly there are men and women who are baser than beasts." "If I were a man I would thrash you," she hissed. "Ask your son Louis, my loving half-brother, to do it for you. Ask that reptile by your side to undertake the task. Cunning and malice have had their day. Let us try brute force." I laughed in their faces. In this encounter we were more like animals snarling at one another than human beings. Meanwhile Barbara continued her moaning and gibbering upstairs. "That is my work, is it not?" I went on. "It is I who have made her what she is, a living shame to decency. Before our marriage she never touched strong drink--is that the way it goes? She was an innocent, simple child of nature, and it is I who have debased and contaminated her. That is what you have made my friends believe. If it is any satisfaction to you, hear from my lips that your cowardly plot has succeeded, and that the honorable career I had mapped out for myself is at an end. Has my wife told you that on the first night of our marriage she locked herself in her room in Paris and drank herself into such a filthy state of intoxication that we were turned out of our hotel? But doubtless she kept this delectable piece of information to herself." "Another of your abominable inventions," cried my stepmother, "as true as all the rest." "Exactly. As true as all the rest. Women such as she, and you, should be whipped daily for the public good."