The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of “plain Mr. Jones” disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to like this in his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew, not exactly scared — though he was in reality of a timid disposition under his manly exterior — but distinctly mystified and impressed.
Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
“I must get rid of these two . It won’t do!”
Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not to make a sound
Beverly skin refining center, knowing from experience that her very assent would be resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in existence — miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the contrast with the feminine form he had ever in his mind’s eye made his wife’s appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing his courage up to the sticking point.
“Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his bedroom, and tell him to be off — him and that secretary of his — early in the morning. of cards, but to make a decoy of my table d’hote — my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal in Manila told him I kept a table d’hote.”
He said these things
travel industry, not for Mrs. Schomberg’s information, but simply thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would give him courage enough to face “plain Mr. Jones.”
“Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper,” he went on. “I have a good mind to —”
He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but that to hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know him altogether
Server Rack. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And, timid in her comer, she ventured to say pressingly:
“Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their trunks.”
