Now I am going to ask you some questions." 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.