"
Before he left her she had asked many questions which were pertinent
and searching, and she had learned things she realised she could have
learned in no other way and from no other person. But for his uncanny
sense of the responsibility he clearly had assumed in the days when he
wore pinafores, and which had brought him to her room to prepare her
mind for what she would find herself confronted with in the way of
apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood that
at the outset she might have found herself more than once dangerously
at a loss. Yes, she would have been at a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly
discouraged. She was face to face with a complication so extraordinary.
That one man, through mere persistent steadiness in evil temper and
domestic tyranny, should have so broken the creatures of his household
into abject submission and hopelessness, seemed too incredible. Such a
power appeared as remote from civilised existence in London and New York
as did that which had inflicted tortures in the dungeons of castles of
old. Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could reach the
outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four hours from Hyde
Park Corner, could utter none the world could hear, or comprehend if it
heard it.
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