All women, when they have had their belief in man in the abstract destroyed by the perfidy of one particular individual, like to visit their disappointment and resentment upon some other individual whom they at the bottom of their hearts know that they can implicitly trust. If he had known it, therefore, Deborah’s snappishness, which she reserved for him alone, was only the natural expression of her indignation that he, the man she did not love, was sound to the core, while the man she did love had proved himself a contemptible wretch. She was not going to own herself in the wrong, though. Oh, no! She bit her lips with a moment’s self-reproach, and then said, quite coldly: “Whether I am happy or not is, you will admit, my own affair. Whether we keep one servant or twenty is, I admit, yours, since you pay them. But I tell you frankly that I feel much more comfortable with only one, because like that, by careful management and without any pinching, I am saving a large sum out of the money you send mamma, which she means to give you to furnish your house when you marry.” Of course Deborah knew that she was hurting him, though she would not have owned it. “How dare you talk of my marrying?” he burst out, almost dancing with rage. “You know I don’t mean to marry; you know you don’t want me to marry.” He had gone a little too near the truth. Naturally enough, Deborah would not have liked to see her own devoted admirer enslaved by another woman, however indifferent to him she herself might be. She gave him one look of speechless indignation, and without heeding the grovelling apologies which he hurriedly began to make, sailed out of the room with the dignity of an empress. She would not speak to him for the remainder of his short visit, except such few words as were absolutely necessary; and these she uttered in a loftily distant tone. Poor Mrs. Pennant saw that something was wrong, and make several discreet, but ineffectual, efforts to put it right. Deborah even took care to be out of the way when, on the following morning, Godwin went away again.