Explore "Foxglove Manor, Volume III" by Robert W. Buchanan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Let me write down, as calmly as I can, exactly what has taken place.
Yesterday, after that little scene, I carried my swooning-wife up to her room, placed her on the bed, and sent her maid to attend to her. Then I walked off to my den, to have my dark hour alone; for I was thoroughly miserable. So far, I felt, I had been beaten with my own weapons. Ellen was going to pose as a Christian martyr, and I had committed the indiscretion of showing the full extent of my jealousy. It would have been far better, on the whole, if, instead of storming and grumbling, I had quietly kicked the clergyman out of my house; but then, I could hardly deal in that way with a man who had simply, on the face of it, performed an act of common civility. The time for kicking had gone past; I had stupidly let it slip. If, when I caught him in the act of trying to embrace my Ellen, and of addressing her softly by her Christian name, I had calmly and decisively thrashed him, he could hardly have accused me of impoliteness; nor would he have been able, without exposing his own fatuity, to noise the affair about.