Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

26. CHAPTER XXVI: MRS PROUDIE TAKES A FALL (continued)

And yet it was not so easy to keep his ground when he was bidden by a lady to go; or to continue to make a third in a party between husband and wife when the wife expressed a wish for a tete-a-tete with her husband.

'Mr Slope,' she repeated, 'I wish to be alone with my lord.'

'His lordship has summoned me on most important diocesan business,' said Mr Slope, glancing with uneasy eye at Dr Proudie. He felt that he must trust something to the bishop, and yet that trust was so woefully misplaced. 'My leaving him at the present moment is, I fear, impossible.'

'Do you bandy words with me, you ungrateful man?' said she. 'My lord, will you do me the favour to beg Mr Slope to leave the room?'

My lord scratched his head, but for the moment said nothing. This was as much as Mr Slope expected from him, and was on the whole, for him, an active exercise of marital rights.

'My lord,' said the lady, 'is Mr Slope to leave this room, or am I?'

Here Mrs Proudie made a false step. She should not have alluded to the possibility of retreat on her part. She should not have expressed the idea that her order for Mr Slope's expulsion could be treated otherwise than by immediate obedience. In answer to such a question the bishop naturally said in his own mind, that it was necessary that one should leave the room, perhaps it might be as well that Mrs Proudie did so. He did say so in his own mind, but externally he again scratched his head and again twiddled his thumbs.

Mrs Proudie was boiling over with wrath. Alas, alas! could she but have kept her temper as her enemy did, she would have conquered as she had ever conquered. But divine anger got the better of her, as it has done of other heroines, and she fell.

'My lord,' said she, 'am I to be vouchsafed an answer or am I not?'