MISS SPAULDING: "What ARE you keeping back?"MISS REED: "Nothing at all--less than nothing! I never thought it was worth mentioning."MISS SPAULDING: "Are you telling me the truth?"MISS REED: "I'm telling you the truth and something more.You can't ask better than that, can you?"MISS SPAULDING, turning to her music again: "Certainly not."MISS REED: in a pathetic wail: "O Henrietta! do you abandon me thus? Well, I will tell you, heartless girl! I've only kept it back till now because it was so extremely mortifying to my pride as an artist--as a student of oil.Will you hear me?"MISS SPAULDING, beginning to play: "No."MISS REED, with burlesque wildness: "You shall!" Miss Spaulding involuntarily desists."There was a moment--a fatal moment--when he said he thought he ought to tell me that if I found oil amusing Icould go on; but that he didn't believe I should ever learn to use it, and he couldn't let me take lessons from him with the expectation that I should.There!"MISS SPAULDING, with awful reproach: "And you call that less than nothing? I've almost a mind never to speak to you again, Ethel.How COULD you deceive me so?"MISS REED: "Was it really deceiving? _I_ shouldn't call it so.And I needed your sympathy so much, and I knew I shouldn't get it unless you thought I was altogether in the right."MISS SPAULDING: "You are altogether in the wrong! And it's YOU that ought to apologize to HIM--on your bended knees.How COULD you offer him money after that? I wonder at you, Ethel!"MISS REED: "Why--don't you see, Nettie?--I did keep on taking the lessons of him.I did find oil amusing--or the oilist--and I kept on.Of course I had to, off there in a farmhouse full of lady boarders, and he the only gentleman short of Crawford's.Strike, but hear me, Henrietta Spaulding! What was I to do about the half-dozen lessons I had taken before he told me I should never learn to use oil? Was I to offer to pay him for these, and not for the rest; or was I to treat the whole series as gratuitous? I used to lie awake thinking about it.I've got little tact, but I couldn't find any way out of the trouble.It was a box--yes, a box of the deepest dye!
And the whole affair having got to be--something else, don't you know?--made it all the worse.And if he'd only--only--But he didn't.
Not a syllable, not a breath! And there I was.I HAD to offer him the money.And it's almost killed me--the way he took my offering it, and now the way you take it! And it's all of a piece." Miss Reed suddenly snatches her handkerchief from her pocket, and buries her face in it.--"Oh, dear--oh, dear! Oh!--hu, hu, hu!"MISS SPAULDING, relenting: "It was awkward."MISS REED: "Awkward! You seem to think that because I carry things off lightly I have no feeling."MISS SPAULDING: "You know I don't think that, Ethel."MISS REED, pursuing her advantage: "I don't know it from you, Nettie.I've tried and TRIED to pass it off as a joke, and to treat it as something funny; but I can tell you it's no joke at all."MISS SPAULDING, sympathetically: "I see, dear."MISS REED: "It's not that I care for him" -MISS SPAULDING: "Why, of course."
MISS REED: "For I don't in the least.He is horrid every way:
blunt, and rude, and horrid.I never cared for him.But I care for myself! He has put me in the position of having done an unkind thing--an unladylike thing--when I was only doing what I had to do.
