"I will not exchange with you!"
"You will not?"
"No."
"But, Patty, just consider the talk and the scandal it will make if you wear a man's dress, to say nothing of the indelicacy."
"Indelicacy! Thanks! We are quits on the score of insults."
The costume Patty had chosen was an old-fashioned dress-suit, with knee-breeches and swallow-tailed coat. In selecting it, she had only considered how perfectly it would answer as a disguise, and had acted upon the impulse of the moment.
"It was not like a public mask," she had said to herself, "but a small party of intimate friends." The words of the lawyer set the matter in wholly a new light before her. She tried to feel that all her anger was against him, but was secretly conscious of the imprudence of the thing she had planned to do. The fact that he was right, and yet wrong by not considering the innocence of her intentions, incensed the girl the more.
"I do not see that you have the right to be my mentor in any case," she exclaimed. "But nothing seems to make you so happy as to see me miserable. Why must you be prying about to discover what dress I mean to wear at all? One would expect you to be sufficiently ashamed of that to keep from betraying yourself. But no: you cannot let slip an opportunity of correcting me, even at the expense of smirching yourself. Oh, and this is the love you professed for me!"
"Patty," he said quietly, as she paused to choke back the sobs which strangled her, "will you be kind enough to tell me what all this is about?"
"About? As if you did not"—