"You can't help it, my dear," he returned. "Socially considered, you _are_ his inferior. You cannot give dinners he would regard with any thing better than a friendly contempt, combined with a certain mild indignation at your having presumed to ask _him_, used to such different ways. It is far more graceful to accept the small fact, and let him have his whim, which is not a subversive one or at all dangerous to the community, being of a sort easy to cure. Ha! ha! ha!" "May I ask what you are laughing at?" I said with severity. "I was only fancying how such a man must feel,--if what your blessed father believes be true,--when he is stripped all at once of every possible source of consequence,--stripped of position, funds, house, including cellar, clothes, body, including stomach"-- "There, there! don't be vulgar. It is not like you, Percivale." "My love, there is far greater vulgarity in refusing to acknowledge the inevitable, either in society or in physiology. Just ask my brother his experience in regard of the word to which you object." "I will leave that to you." "Don't be vexed with me, my wife," he said. "I don't like not to be allowed to pay my debts." "Back to the starting-point, like a hunted hare! A woman's way," he said merrily, hoping to make me laugh; for he could not doubt I should see the absurdity of my position with a moment's reflection. But I was out of temper, and chose to pounce upon the liberty taken with my sex, and regard it as an insult. Without a word I rose, pressed my baby to my bosom as if her mother had been left a widow, and swept away. Percivale started to his feet. I did not see, but I knew he gazed after me for a moment; then I heard him sit down to his painting as if nothing had happened, but, I knew, with a sharp pain inside his great chest. For me, I found the precipice, or Jacob's ladder, I had to climb, very subversive of my dignity; for when a woman has to hold a baby in one arm, and with the hand of the other lift the front of her skirt in order to walk up an almost perpendicular staircase, it is quite impossible for her to _sweep_ any more. When I reached the top, I don't know how it was, but the picture he had made of me, with the sunset-shine coming through the window, flashed upon my memory. All dignity forgotten, I bolted through the door at the top, flung my baby into the arms of her nurse, turned, almost tumbled headlong down the precipice, and altogether tumbled down at my husband's chair. I couldn't speak; I could only lay my head on his knees. "Darling," he said, "you shall ask the great Pan Jan with his button atop, if you like. I'll do my best for him." Between crying and laughing, I nearly did what I have never really done yet,--I nearly _went off_. There! I am sure that phrase is quite as objectionable as the word I wrote a little while ago; and there it shall stand, as a penance for having called any word my husband used _vulgar_.