"Dinner was really finished, mother."
"That makes no difference! No one has a right to leave the table until I rise. I consider Dora's behavior a piece of impertinence."
"I do not think she intended it to be impertinent."
"Her intention makes no difference. No one has a right to leave my table until I set the example. And if Dora's behavior was not impertinent, then it was stupid ignorance, and I shall instruct her in the decencies of respectable life. And I tell you both to remember that her name is Dora. I will have no Theodoras here. Fancy people going about the house calling 'The-o-do-ra.' Ridiculous!"
"Well, mother, I ask leave to say that I should not like any one without my permission to call me Bell, nor do I believe Christina would care to be called Kirsty. And I really think Robert's wife wished to be agreeable, and even friendly, if we had encouraged her. Why not give her a fair trial? I think she could teach Christina and myself many things."
"I think you are bewitched as well as your brother. I never knew you, Isabel, to make any exceptions to my opinions—or to see me insulted without feeling a proper indignation with me."
"Oh, dear mother, you are mistaken! The day will never come when your daughter Isabel will not stand shoulder to shoulder with you."
"I am sure of that. I wish Christina had not asked such an obtrusive question. I had to answer it as I did, in order to show that woman that we—in our own home here—would call her just what we preferred to call her, without let or hindrance; yet I wish that Christina had kept her foolish question for a little longer. I was hardly ready for active opposition. It is premature. Christina always interferes at the wrong moment." So Christina, snubbed and blamed for her malapropos question, subsided into sullen indifference externally, while inwardly passing on the blame for her correction to Theodora, who, she decided, was going to be unlucky to her.
In the meantime Robert had walked with his wife to the parlor door of their own apartments, but he did not enter with her. "I am going to leave you half-an-hour, Dora," he said. "I wish to smoke a cigar in the library."
"I should like to go with you, Robert, as I have always done. I enjoy good tobacco."