At her door she stood on guard, refusing admittance.

Once, indeed, when hard pressed by Rosenblatt demanding entrance, she had thrown herself before him with a butcher knife in her hand, and with a look of such transforming fierceness on her face as drove him from the house in fear of his life.

She was no longer his patient drudge, but a woman defending, not so much her own, as her husband's honour, a tigress guarding her young.
Never again did Rosenblatt attempt to pass through that door, but schooled himself to wait a better time and a safer path to compass his vengeance.

But from that moment, where there had been merely contempt for Paulina and her family, there sprang up bitter hatred.
He hated them all--the woman who was his dupe and his slave, but who balked him of his revenge; the boy who brought him the cents for which he froze during the winter evenings at the corner of Portage and Main, but who with the cents gave him fierce and fearless looks; and this girl suddenly transformed from a timid, stupid, ill-dressed Galician child, into a being of grace and loveliness and conscious power.

No wonder that as he followed her with his eye, noting all this new grace and beauty, he felt uneasy.
Already she seemed to have soared far beyond his sordid world and far beyond his grasp.