"Injure you? Do you think I am an evil-disposed person?"
"You injured me before my marriage, and you have now suspected me of secretly favouring another man for money!"
"I could not help what I thought. But I have never spoken of you outside my house."
"You spoke of me within it, to Clym, and you could not do worse."
"I did my duty."
"And I'll do mine."
"A part of which will possibly be to set him against his mother. It is always so. But why should I not bear it as others have borne it before me!"
"I understand you," said Eustacia, breathless with emotion. "You think me capable of every bad thing. Who can be worse than a wife who encourages a lover, and poisons her husband's mind against his relative? Yet that is now the character given to me. Will you not come and drag him out of my hands?"
Mrs. Yeobright gave back heat for heat.
"Don't rage at me, madam! It ill becomes your beauty, and I am not worth the injury you may do it on my account, I assure you. I am only a poor old woman who has lost a son."
"If you had treated me honourably you would have had him still." Eustacia said, while scalding tears trickled from her eyes. "You have brought yourself to folly; you have caused a division which can never be healed!"
"I have done nothing. This audacity from a young woman is more than I can bear."
"It was asked for; you have suspected me, and you have made me speak of my husband in a way I would not have done. You will let him know that I have spoken thus, and it will cause misery between us. Will you go away from me? You are no friend!"
"I will go when I have spoken a word. If anyone says I have come here to question you without good grounds for it, that person speaks untruly. If anyone says that I attempted to stop your marriage by any but honest means, that person, too, does not speak the truth. I have fallen on an evil time; God has been unjust to me in letting you insult me! Probably my son's happiness does not lie on this side of the grave, for he is a foolish man who neglects the advice of his parent. You, Eustacia, stand on the edge of a precipice without knowing it. Only show my son one-half the temper you have shown me today--and you may before long--and you will find that though he is as gentle as a child with you now, he can be as hard as steel!"