“With Amelia?”
“With Amelia Battle.”
“But tell me,” Mrs. Cromwell implored. “My dear, I’ve been in such a state of perplexity——”
“Perplexity!” her friend echoed scornfully, and demanded: “What sort of state do you think I’ve been in? My dear, I went to her.”
“To Amelia?”
“To Amelia Battle,” Mrs. Dodge said. “I went straight home after I left you yesterday; but I kept thinking about what we’d seen——”
“You mean——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, and glanced nervously through the glass of the broad-paned window beside which she and her guest had seated themselves. Her troubled eyes came to rest upon the pinkish Italian villa across the street. “You mean what we saw—over there?”
“I mean what was virtually an embrace between Roderick Brooks Battle and Mrs. Sylvester under our eyes,” Mrs. Dodge said angrily. “And she looked us square in the face just before she did it! I also mean that both of them showed by their manner that such caresses were absolutely familiar and habitual—and that was all I needed to prove that the talk about them was only too well founded. So, when I’d thought it over and over—Oh, I didn’t act in haste!—I decided it was somebody’s absolute duty to prepare Amelia for what I plainly saw was coming to her. Did you ever see anything show more proprietorship than Mrs. Sylvester’s fondling of that man’s shoulder? So, as you had declared you wouldn’t go, and although it was late, and Mr. Dodge and I had an important dinner engagement, I made up my mind it had to be done immediately and I went.”
“But what did you tell her?” Mrs. Cromwell implored.
“Never,” said Mrs. Dodge, “never in my life have I had such an experience! I tried to begin tactfully; I didn’t want to give her a shock, and so I tried to begin and lead up to it; but it was difficult to begin at all, because I’d scarcely sat down before she told me my husband had got home and had telephoned to see if I’d reached her house, and he’d left word for me to come straight back home because he was afraid we’d be late for the dinner—and all the time I was trying to talk to her, her maid kept coming in to say he was calling up again, and then I’d have to go and beseech him to let me alone for a minute—but he wouldn’t——”