"Woman! if you ever do that thing again, I'll—I'll—aren't you ashamed of yourself, Mrs. Winslow?"
At the sound of her name, and after a few moments' apparently bewildered reflection, Mrs. Winslow opened her eyes, which had previously remained closed, and in an affectedly startled way gasped:
"Oh! where am I? what have you been trying to do with me, Mr. Bristol?"
To have seen the couple thus in the full gaslight before the pier-glass, which both reflected and intensified the odd situation—the woman, held to the mirror so that she might more startlingly view the result of her gauzy pretence at somnambulism, and the man, in his night-shirt, his limp night-cap dangling from his neck upon his shoulder, the ring of stubby gray hair around his head raised by excitement until it almost hid the glistening baldness above, his legs bare below the knees, but with a face so full of virtuous resentment at the scandalous and shallow scheme of the woman to implicate him in something disgraceful, that his uprightness clothed him as with fine raiment—would have been to have witnessed the apotheosis of sublimely triumphant virtue and the defeat of shame.
"What have I been trying to do with you?" shouted the now enraged Bristol; "that's all very fine; but what have you been trying to do with me, madam?"
"Why, didn't I ever tell you that I often walk in my sleep?" she asked with apparent innocence; and then, as if noticing for the first time how meagrely both herself and her companion were clad, gave vent to a half-smothered "Oh!—shame on you, Mr. Bristol!" and broke away from him, running into her own room, while Bristol, after walking back and forth in a state of high nervous excitement for some time, muttering, and shaking his fist towards her room, finally smoothed his rebellious locks so as to admit of the readjustment of his night-cap, and trotted fiercely to bed, never more to be disturbed by sleep-walking female Spiritualists.
There was nothing in all this save a quite common and silly attempt on the part of the adventuress to get some of the hard-earned money of which she thought he was possessed, and it disgusted her that he was no more appreciative than to look upon her charms, that had set the heads of so many other men all awhirl, with such a cool and impressionless regard for them.
This latter fact bothered her probably fully as much as in not being able to get at his bank account, and she finally settled into a sort of suspicious dislike of him, and turned her attention to Fox, who, being a quiet sort of a fellow, with less brusqueness than Bristol, was not so well fitted to keep her at arm's length, and was consequently immediately the recipient of her torrent-like attentions, caresses, and confidence.