Well! It seemed going to be a long discussion.
I sat down on the garden bench a step or so away, and turned my head to look at the glimmering white trumpets of a tobacco-plant that grew behind the bench. The only form in which tobacco smells anything but poisonous! And there were such beds of it at home ... in the evening it scented all the grounds....
“Major Montresor, as he told you, knew me in my home, knew all my people,” I went on slowly. “He knew all the places I went to before I had to drop out of everything that I cared for and had to slave for my own living in that detestable City of yours.”
“You speak as if I owned the City—as if I were responsible for your having had to work there—for the whole thing! Is that fair? Must you go on making me stand for all that? Supposing it hadn’t been there at all that you first met me, Nancy?”
For the first time the name slipped out from my official fiancé quite naturally.
“Don’t you think,” he went on, “that we might have managed to get on moderately well then?”
“How can I tell?” said I. I wanted to keep him on that strictly business footing. This other I didn’t want. I knew it would take something from me, and give me nothing—nothing to stand up for myself with—in its place.
“Try to imagine,” he persisted, “that I’d known you in your home, like that chap—what’s-his-name—”
The name—Vandeleur—flickered between us once more like that bat in the air!