She humiliated her often enough herself. It was the only means she knew of asserting her authority; for she had no intention of ever being the object of her daughter's contempt. She was harsh to the point of brutality, so that the girl's heart was wont to quicken apprehensively whenever she heard her step. She scolded, she punished, she coerced. But from an outsider, the bare thought of a snub was unendurable, and the possibility that Dinah might by any means lay herself open to one was enough to bring down the vials of wrath upon her head. Dinah remembered still with shivering vividness the whipping she had received on one occasion for demeaning herself by running after the de Vignes's carriage to deliver a message. Her mother's whippings had always been very terrible, vindictively thorough. The indignity of them lashed her soul even more cruelly than the unsparing thong her body. Because of them she went in daily trepidation, submissive almost to the point of abjectness, lest this hateful and demoralizing form of punishment should be inflicted upon her. For some time now, by great wariness and circumspection she had evaded it, and she had begun to entertain the trembling hope that she was at last considered to have passed the age for such childish correction. But her mother's outbreak of violence on the day of their departure had been a painful disillusion, and she knew well what it would mean to return home in disgrace with the de Vignes. Her cheeks burned and tingled still with the shame of the discovery. She felt that another of the old dreadful chastisements would overwhelm her utterly. And yet that she would most certainly have to endure it if she were unruly now was conviction that pressed like a cold weight upon her heart. Had not the letter she had received from her mother only that morning contained a stern injunction to her to behave herself, as though she had been a naughty, wayward child?
"It would kill me!" she told herself passionately. "Oh, why, why, why can't I grow up quick and marry? But I never shall grow up at home. That's the horrible, horrible part of it. And I shall never have a chance of marrying with mother looking on. I'm just a slave--a slave. Other girls can have a good time, do as they like, flirt when they like. But I--never--never!"
Her fit of rebellion lasted long. The emancipation from the home bondage was beginning to work within her as the Colonel had predicted. Seen from a distance, the old tyranny seemed outrageous and impossible, to go back into it monstrous. And yet, so far as she could see, there was no way of escape. She was not apparently to be allowed to make any friends outside her own sphere. The freedom she had begun to enjoy so feverishly had very suddenly been circumscribed, and if she dared to overstep the bounds marked out for her, she knew what to expect.