“Yes, I was,” her mother interrupted. “I was certainly sitting there! But I wasn’t coldly criticizing him in my mind; you’re wrong about that. After two hours of it, my mental criticism was getting pretty warm, Lily. In fact, I think it would have scorched me if I hadn’t finally got rid of him.”
“Got rid of him?” Lily repeated, slowly. “Mamma—you—you weren’t——” She left the sentence eloquently unfinished.
“Certainly I wasn’t rude to him,” Mrs. Dodge returned, sharply. “I showed him the patience of an angel as long as I could, and then I merely mentioned something I wish I’d thought of long before; and he picked up his plush hat and yellow gloves and went home.”
“That’s as unjust as everything else you say of him. It isn’t plush; it’s velours,” Lily said. Then she asked ominously: “Mamma, what was it you merely mentioned?”
“I told him it was getting to be about your father’s usual time of returning for dinner; that was all.”
“All!” Lily cried. “When you knew that Papa wrote him to stop coming here, and Price never does come any more when Papa’s here.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “I’ll admit he’s that sensitive! Your father’s letter was courteous—but clear.”
“Courteous!” Lily echoed, and she became tragically rigid. She breathed visibly; her eyes were luminous with suffering and indignation; her sweet and searching little silver carillon of a voice became tremulous and loud. “It was unspeakable! I never knew Papa had such brutality in him. And you—I thought you were my friend, Mamma; but now I see what you did this afternoon! Price told you the story of his life because he was defending himself; he was trying to make you understand him. And all the while he was trying to, you sat there coldly critical, and then insulted him by telling him Papa might come in. You did, Mamma! You did! That’s just what it amounted to.”
“You consider it’s an insult to a young man to tell him that your father may be arriving home presently?”
“Under the circumstances,” Lily returned, bitterly, and quite correctly, “it certainly was a deadly insult. And you say he isn’t sensitive! Nobody understands how sensitive he is! And to think he has to undergo such humiliations for me—all for me!” With that, becoming every moment more emotionally dramatic, Lily turned to a silver-framed photograph upon her desk, and addressed it, extending her arms to it in piteous appeal. “Oh!” she cried, “when I think of all you have to go through for my sake—for me——”