“He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?” I suggested, as though it were an after-thought.
“He had nothing to do with my coming,” asserted Lady Alicia.
“Then it was your own idea?” I asked.
“Then what did you hope to gain?” I demanded.
“I wasn’t considering my own feelings,” imperially acknowledged her ladyship.
“That was very noble of you,” I admitted, “especially when you bear in mind that you weren’t considering mine, either! And what’s more, Lady Newland, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, that you can’t get anything out of it. I gave up my home to you, the home I’d helped make by the work of my own hands. And I gave up the hope of bringing up my children as they ought to be brought up. I even gave up my dignity and my happiness, in the hope that things could be made to come out straight. But I’m not going to give up my husband. Remember that, I’m not going to give him up. I don’t care what he says or feels, at this particular moment; I’m not going to give him up to make a mess of what’s left of the rest of his life. He may not know what’s ahead of him, but I do! And now that you’re shown me just what you are, and just what you’re ready to do, I intend to take a hand in this. I intend to fight you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of the hat! And if that sounds primitive, as you’ve already suggested, it’ll pay you to remember that you’re out here in a primitive country where we’re apt to do our fighting in a mighty primitive way!”
It was a very grand speech, but it would have been more impressive, I think, if I hadn’t been suddenly startled by a glimpse of Whinstane Sandy’s rock-ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at almost the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip of Struthers’ sage-green coiffure above the nearest sill of the shack. And it would have been a grander speech if I’d stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car. Then she stepped up to the car-seat, as slowly and deliberately as a sovereign stepping up to her throne.
“It may not be so simple as it seems,” she announced with great dignity, as she proceeded to start her car. And the same dignity might have attended her entire departure, but in the excitement she apparently flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work, and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed until she was quite red in the face. And when the car finally did get under way, the running-gear became slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it was not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly demolished that the automobile found its right-of-way undisputed and anything like dignity returned to the situation.
I stood there, with the long-handled preserving spoon still in my hand, staring after Lady Alicia and the dust that arose from her car-wheels. I stood there in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone out of my bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ringing in my ears.