“Lydia!” he shouted, still outrageous in his mirth. “Let’s forget that part of it and remember only Dolling!”
“All right,” she said, and her angry eyes flashed. “Suppose his name was Dolling. What was she talking to him about rosemary and remembrance for?”
“I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem important. The only thing I can get my mind on is your keeping to yourself so solemnly the scandalous romance of Dolling!” And becoming more respectably sober, for a time, he asked her: “Don’t you really see a little fun in it, Lydia?”
“What!” she cried. “Do you? After you saw that wretched little man of hers stand up there and recite his lesson like a trained monkey? Did you look at her while he was performing? She stood in the doorway and held the whip-lash over him till he finished! And if this idol of yours is so innocent and pure, why did she go all to pieces the way she did when she saw me that morning by the hedge?”
“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “Of course she saw you thought she’d called the man ‘darling’! She knew you didn’t know his name was Dolling. Isn’t it plain to you yet?”
“No!” his wife said, vehemently. “It isn’t plain to me and it never will be!”
XVII
“DOLLING”
AGAINST all reason she persisted in a sinister interpretation of her lovely neighbour’s conduct;—never would Mrs. Dodge admit that Mr. Dodge had the right of the matter, and after a time she complained that she found his continued interest in it “pretty tiresome.”
“You keep bringing it up,” she said, “because you think you’ve had a wretched little triumph over me. It’s one of those things that never can be settled either way, and I don’t care to talk of it any more. If you want to occupy your spare thoughts I have a topic to offer you.”