"I have been here seven weeks, and I am your wife, and I have got a settlement that does not depend on your good opinion," said Hannah. "Yes, I can. That is precisely what you bought when you married a woman off your own doorstep, and I do not think you had thought about it."
Nicholas Ware stood in the middle of that room. "The orchard will not fruit for six years," he said.
"I know it."
"I gave that order in the second year because I could not see any sense in putting nine pounds into a thing I should never see. And I have thought about that order about four hundred times since, and I have never once changed my mind about it."
"Then keep the order," said Hannah Sedge, "and I shall pay for the orchard myself, out of my own settlement, and it will be mine. And when you are dead, it will still be mine, because it is in the deed you had drawn, and I shall have apples in six years in a house I have got for my life. That is not a threat, Nicholas, and I am not being clever with you. I am telling you that there are two people in this house now, and that one of them is six-and-thirty and has been given a date, and the other one is six-and-twenty and has not. And that you cannot arrange the whole of this building around your own arithmetic anymore, because it is not the only arithmetic in it."
Nobody in that room said anything for about four seconds. Then Nicholas Ware sat down rather suddenly in the chair by the window, and Hannah understood by then exactly what that meant, and did not remark on it.
"Nobody has spoken to me like that in eight years," he said.
"I am aware."
"No, I do not mean it as a complaint, and I am not angry, and I am extremely out of breath, and it is not because of you." He put his hand flat on the arm of the chair. "I mean that I have been surrounded since I was eight-and-twenty by about forty people who are all being careful with me, and that I have found it perfectly comfortable, and that I have not had one conversation in eight years in which anybody wanted anything from me that I was not already planning to give them. And a woman I have known seven weeks has just told me that I have stopped a whole house because I could not bear to spend nine pounds on apples."