“The devil take you and all your soft speeches!” he said, through his clenched teeth. “You are an out and out bad woman. That’s what you are. If you weren’t their mother I would----.” His voice choked in his throat. He turned quickly, took up his hat and cane from the chair he had left them on, and went out of the room without looking behind him. He closed the door roughly and ran down the staircase. A youthful philosopher in powder and black shoulder-knots, who was on duty at the head of the stairs, looked after his retreating figure with placid derision. “She’s wanting him to be spliced to her and he won’t hear of it,” thought the youth; but even philosophers in powder, whose Portico is the vestibule of a fashionable London house, sometimes err in their conclusions. Fury, as though it were the drug _curare_, held her motionless and speechless as she heard the door close behind her self-emancipated slave. The common coarse language of the streets used to her! She could not believe her ears. Her rage stifled her. She could scarcely breathe. The Blenheims were frightened at her expression and went under a sofa. She took the satin wheelbarrow--she did not know why, except that it was associated in her thoughts with him--and she broke it, and tore it, and flung its contents all over the room, and trampled on the gilded wheel and handles till they were mere glittering splinters and shivers. That exercise of violence did her good, the blood ceased to buzz in her ears, her nerves grew calmer; she would willingly have killed someone or something, but even this destruction of a toy did her good, it was better than nothing, it relaxed the tension of her nerves. It had allowed her a little of that violent physical action which is the instinct of even civilized human nature when it is offended or outraged. When she was a little calmer and could reflect, she thought she would tell his commanding officer and demand his punishment; she thought she would tell the Prince of Wales and entreat his exclusion from Marlborough House and Sandringham; she thought she would tell the editor of _Truth_, and beg him to have a paragraph about it. Then, as she grew calmer still, she became aware that she could tell nobody at all anything whatever. If the world knew that Harry had used bad words to her, the world would immediately ask what tether had been given to Harry that he had ever so greatly dared. “The coward, the coward!” she said, in her teeth. “He knows I can’t even have him thrashed by another man.”